An approach of refining RC4 with performance analysis on new variants

Abstract

Many years of research on the RC4 stream cipher proves it to be strong enough, but there are claims that its swap function is responsible for essential biases in the output. There are suggestions to discard some initial bytes from the key-stream, to get rid of this, before the actual encryption starts, though no optimum value has been defined. In this paper, by analysing different variants of RC4, the authors have attempted to find out whether this cipher becomes more secure by discarding initial bytes and, if so, what is its optimum limit. Also, multiple S-boxes generated by different logics and a unique key-mixing procedure have been implemented, which made k RC4 more robust.