Hi, There are some recent research articles about attack against RC4 in TLS. Some of these attacks were well known earlier, like biases in the first 256 numbers generated from the RC4 PRG, the newer research combines this with statistical procedure to extract plaintext from ciphertext.
I searched the openssl-dev achieves, but it seems that there is not public discussion going around this yet. Any idea if openssl is contemplating making changes to the RC4 protocol to make it safer. Of-course a long/medium term solution could be to switch to AEAD ciphersuites (AES-GCM for example). However in the short term there could be other solutions like - Adding random numbers of bytes to initial requests. - Fragmenting initial request into 1 byte fields so that the first 254 numbers are consumed. Reference: http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/03/attack-of-week-rc4-is-kind-of-broken-in.html http://www.isg.rhul.ac.uk/tls/ Regards, Huzaifa Sidhpurwala ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org Development Mailing List [email protected] Automated List Manager [email protected]
