A metaheuristic tabu search approach for internal state reconstruction of RC4 stream cipher
Bogdan Crainicu, Enachescu Calin · 2011
Because of its simplicity and speed, RC4 is one of the most widely used stream cipher. In this paper we advance a cryptanalytic attack based on Tabu search algorithm which tries to reconstruct the internal state of RC4. Our attack relies on the cryptanalytic algorithm presented by Knudsen et al. in [9], the tree representation of the output word Ztand the tree of general conditions presented by Tomaševic et al. in [21]. Although the results of analitical calculations are slightly better than those given in [9] and [21], the attack remains impractical due to the high complexity.