[622] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: RC4 Security (formerly: Re: The unmentionable algorithm)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Mon Apr 21 19:43:16 1997
To: coderpunks@toad.com, cryptography@c2.net
In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 21 Apr 1997 15:35:39 PDT."
<199704212235.PAA29908@jefferson.hidden.net>
Reply-To: perry@piermont.com
Date: Mon, 21 Apr 1997 19:33:36 -0400
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Anonymous writes:
> Bruce Schneier <schneier@counterpane.com> writes:
>
> > I've never been a fan of RC4; there are more problems with it than
> > the published analysis indicates. I know of people working on RC4,
> > but they don't want to publish until they have a good result; we are
> > afraid that RSADSI will use the publication of partial results to
> > "prove" the strength of RC4.
> > ...
>
> Well, that makes RC4 sound rather unappealing. However, is there any
> other stream or block cipher that's even remotely as efficient as RC4?
SEAL is patented, but is a) a Coppersmith design (and he's one of the
few people who's cryptographic instincts I trust almost implicitly)
and b) is far faster than anything else I've ever seen. It also has
very nice properties that make it far more useful for applications
like disk encryption than most stream ciphers would have.
Perry
