On the Security of RC4 in TLS

Authors: 

Nadhem AlFardan, Royal Holloway, University of London; Daniel J. Bernstein, University of Illinois at Chicago and Technische Universiteit Eindhoven; Kenneth G. Paterson, Bertram Poettering, and Jacob C.N. Schuldt, Royal Holloway, University of London

Abstract: 

The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol aims to provide confidentiality and integrity of data in transit across untrusted networks. TLS has become the de facto protocol standard for secured Internet and mobile applications. TLS supports several symmetric encryption options, including a scheme based on the RC4 stream cipher. In this paper, we present ciphertext-only plaintext recovery attacks against TLS when RC4 is selected for encryption. Our attacks build on recent advances in the statistical analysis of RC4, and on new findings announced in this paper. Our results are supported by an experimental evaluation of the feasibility of the attacks. We also discuss countermeasures.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {182942,
author = {Nadhem AlFardan and Daniel J. Bernstein and Kenneth G. Paterson and Bertram Poettering and Jacob C. N. Schuldt},
title = {On the Security of RC4 in {TLS}},
booktitle = {Presented as part of the 22nd {USENIX} Security Symposium ({USENIX} Security 13)},
year = {2013},
isbn = {978-1-931971-03-4},
address = {Washington, D.C.},
pages = {305--320},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity13/technical-sessions/paper/alFardan},
publisher = {{USENIX}},
}
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