Columbia crypto box

[Steven M. Bellovin]

In message <v03110708ba6df9a4efb3@[192.168.1.5]>, Bill Frantz writes:
>At 4:29 PM -0800 2/10/03, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
>>In message <v03110705ba6dec92ddb0@[192.168.1.5]>, Bill Frantz writes:
>>
>>>  * Fast key setup (Forget tossing the 256 bytes of key stream.
>>>    The designers weren't crypto engineers.  Personally, I'd toss the
>>>    first 1024.)
>>
>>...
>>
>>There may be a cryptographically sound reason to discard that much, but
>>it's not without cost.
>
>The reason I would discard so much is that when I did some statistics on
>RC4 output, I kept getting distribution lumps out to about 1024.  They made
>me worry about what someone who knew what were doing could do.
>

That's a good reason...  (At that point, even with older hardware, AES 
might be better -- and of course, using a block cipher solves lots of 
other problems, too...)

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb (me)
		http://www.wilyhacker.com (2nd edition of "Firewalls" book)



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