RC4 [was: RE: Passport Passwords Stored in Plaintext]

[Arnold G. Reinhold]

At 10:04 AM -0400 10/22/2001, Adam Shostack wrote:
>On Sun, Oct 21, 2001 at 04:11:19PM -0700, Jeff Simmons wrote:
>| On Sunday 21 October 2001 02:52 pm, you wrote:
>|
>| >Designing protocols is a hard field, and
>| >there seem to be lots of mistakes made when people use RC4.  Is that
>| >because its a bad cipher?  No, its because people aren't used to
>| >working with it.  Because of that, I tend to look askew at RC4 based
>| >systems.
>|
>| Are you referring to RC4 in particular, or streaming cyphers in
>| general?  And if it's just RC4, do you have a streaming cypher that
>| you prefer to it?
>
>Good question; the problems with RC4 have been a mix of not knowing
>how to use stream ciphers ("Don't cross the streams!") and issues with
>RC4 (needing to discard the first little chunk of stream as it gets up
>to speed.
>
>I've seen people go to RC4 for speed more than for its stream cipher
>nature.  I tend to push towards block ciphers, simply because we in
>the public world have a lot more experience using them.
>
>Adam
>
>
>--
>"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
>					               -Hume
>

An important advantage of RC4 is that it is easy to reproduce from 
memory. If efforts to suppress cryptography ever intensify enough, it 
may be the only cipher that is widely available.

There was a news report on NPR this morning that the U.S. Nuclear 
Regulatory Commission http://www.nrc.gov/ has taken down its Web site 
after a request by the Department of Defense to remove material that 
might be helpful to terrorists. The site now says:

"In support of our mission to protect public health and safety, the 
NRC is performing a review of all material  on our site. In the 
interim, only select content will be available. We appreciate your 
patience and understanding during these difficult times."

The same could happen at NIST some day.  Your tag line is 
particularly apt here.

Arnold Reinhold



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