Date: Thu, 15 Sep 94 10:52:03 EDT From: perry@imsi.com (Perry E. Metzger)

Can anyone see any reason why one could not change RC4 to being a word oriented stream cipher, call it "ERC4"?

Alleged-RC4 (1) requires that the table be a permutation and (2) might base security on the fact that the table is itself permuted beyond recognition after a small number of inputs. (1) You could conceivably go to an array of 65K short values and retain the permutation but I wouldn't try to go to an array of longs. I don't have 32GB of RAM on my workstation. (2) With a longer array, the amount of input until the array is indistinguishable from the one with which you started is proportionally longer. I don't know if that means that shorter arrays are more secure, but it's worth taking a look at. - Carl