Cryptographers Break Commonly Used RC4 Cipher

Posted by timothy on Thursday March 14, 2013 @06:45AM from the do-it-one-nanotimes dept.

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "At the Fast Software Encryption conference in Singapore earlier this week, University of Illinois at Chicago Professor Dan Bernstein presented a method for breaking TLS and SSL web encryption when it's combined with the popular stream cipher RC4 invented by Ron Rivest in 1987. Bernstein demonstrated that when the same message is encrypted enough times--about a billion--comparing the ciphertext can allow the message to be deciphered. While that sounds impractical, Bernstein argued it can be achieved with a compromised website, a malicious ad or a hijacked router." RC4 may be long in the tooth, but it remains very widely used.

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Jokes on him! by Kenja · 2013-03-14 06:53 · Score: 5, Funny

I always change my message after the 999,999,999th time I send it with the same encryption key.

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