I've been looking at the RC4 (or alleged RC4) code a bit. Unlike most ciphers, RC4 doesn't seem to have any particular word length dependancies in its principles. That is to say, a cipher like IDEA has lots of magic numbers involved, but RC4 does not, which means that one could, in principle, extend it from being byte oriented stream to being word oriented stream without causing particular harm. (It would, of course, become incompatible, but thats not a real issue.) Can anyone see any reason why one could not change RC4 to being a word oriented stream cipher, call it "ERC4"? The reason I ask is because this would speed things up by a factor of four on 32 bit machines, which would mean modest hardware could possibly break 100mbps speeds. The 64 bit extension on 64 bit RISC processors could go far, far, faster still. This is a real consideration in the protection of network traffic, where extremely fast encryption in software has been a stumbling block. Perry