[email protected] (Niels Möller) writes:

> Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> There are some keys which are even weaker, for example keys beginning
>> with 00 00 FD and 03 FD FC, see this paper:
>>
>> http://impic.org/papers/WeakKeys-report.pdf
>
> This still exploits statistical properties of the first few generated
> bytes, right?

Yes, that's true.

> So if you generate and discard the first 512 or 1024 bytes or so of
> the keystream, the statistics for these keys shouldn't be much
> different from any oter keys, right?

Right.  I think 512 bytes is a bit on the low end these days,
conservative recommendations are now up 3072 bytes:

http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/hopwood/crypto/scan/cs.html#RC4-drop

Note that the RC4 keystream can be distinguished from random with only
about a few GB's of stream output regardless of how many initial bytes
are dropped.  This suggests to me that there are attacks that will work
regardless of how much initial output you discard.

/Simon
_______________________________________________
nettle-bugs mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.lysator.liu.se/mailman/listinfo/nettle-bugs

Reply via email to