Cracking RC4/40 for massive wiretapps

Hal hfinney at shell.portal.com
Thu Aug 1 14:17:20 PDT 1996


When I wrote my previous message about the use of lookup tables, I forgot
about the use of salt, extra key bits which vary per message and are sent
in the clear.  That defeats the table lookup approach for searching for
messages which were encrypted with a given key.  There are really 128 key
bits per message, with 40 of them kept secret.

Hal






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