5.23 Setting Up and Using RC4

5.23.1 Problem

You want to use RC4 securely.

5.23.2 Solution

You can't be very confident about the security of RC4 for general-purpose use, owing to theoretical weaknesses. However, if you're willing to use only a very few RC4 outputs (a limit of about 100,000 bytes of output), you can take a risk, as long as you properly set it up.

Before using the standard initialization functions provided by your cryptographic library, take one of the following two steps:

  • Cryptographically hash the key material before using it.

  • Discard the first 256 bytes of the generated keystream.

After initialization, RC4 is used just as any block cipher in a streaming mode is used.

Most libraries implement RC4, but it is so simple that we provide an implementation in the following section.

5.23.3 Discussion

RC4 is a simple cipher that is really easy to use once you have it set up securely, which is actually difficult to do! Due to this key-setup problem, RC4's theoretical weaknesses, and the availability of faster solutions that look more secure, we recommend you just not use RC4. If you're looking for a very fast solution, we recommend SNOW 2.0.

In this recipe, we'll start off ignoring the RC4 key-setup problem. We'll show you how to use RC4 properly, giving a complete implementation. Then, after all that, we'll discuss how to set it up securely.

As with any other symmetric encryption algorithm, it is particularly important to use a MAC along with RC4 to ensure data integrity. We discuss MACs extensively in Chapter 6.

RC4 requires a little bit of state, including a 256-byte buffer and two 8-bit counters. Here's a declaration for an RC4_CTX data type:

typedef struct {   unsigned char sbox[256];   unsigned char i, j; } RC4_CTX;

In OpenSSL, the same sort of context is named RC4_KEY, which is a bit of a misnomer. Throughout this recipe, we will use RC4_CTX, but our implementation is otherwise compatible with OpenSSL's (our functions have the same names and parameters). You'll only need to include the correct header file, and alias RC4_CTX to RC4_KEY.

The "official" RC4 key setup function isn't generally secure without additional work, but we need to have it around anyway:

#include <stdlib.h>     void RC4_set_key(RC4_CTX *c, size_t keybytes, unsigned char *key) {   int           i, j;   unsigned char keyarr[256], swap;       c->i = c->j = 0;   for (i = j = 0;  i < 256;  i++, j = (j + 1) % keybytes) {     c->sbox[i] = i;     keyarr[i] = key[j];   }   for (i = j = 0;  i < 256;  i++) {     j += c->sbox[i] + keyarr[i];     j %= 256;     swap = c->sbox[i];     c->sbox[i] = c->sbox[j];     c->sbox[j] = swap;   } }

The RC4 function has the following arguments:

c

Pointer to an RC4_CTX object.

n

Number of bytes to encrypt.

in

Buffer to encrypt.

out

Output buffer.

void RC4(RC4_CTX *c, size_t n, unsigned char *in, unsigned char *out) {   unsigned char swap;       while (n--) {     c->j += c->sbox[++c->i];     swap = c->sbox[c->i];     c->sbox[c->i] = c->sbox[c->j];     c->sbox[c->j] = swap;     swap = c->sbox[c->i] + c->sbox[c->j];     *out++ = *in++ ^ c->sbox[swap];   } }

That's it for an RC4 implementation. This function can be used incrementally or as an "all-in-one" solution.

Now let's look at how to key RC4 properly.

Without going into the technical details of the problems with RC4 key setup, it's sufficient to say that the real problem occurs when you key multiple RC4 instances with related keys. For example, in some circles it is common to use a truncated base key, then concatenate a counter for each message (which is not a good idea in and of itself because it reduces the effective key strength).

The first way to solve this problem is to use a cryptographic hash function to randomize the key. If your key is 128 bits, you can use MD5 and take the entire digest value, or you can use a hash function with a larger digest, such as SHA1 or SHA-256, truncating the result to the appropriate size.

Here's some code for setting up an RC4 context by hashing key material using MD5 (include openssl/md5.h to have this work directly with OpenSSL's implementation). MD5 is fine for this purpose; you can also use SHA1 and truncate to 16 bytes.

/* Assumes you have not yet initialized the context, but have allocated it. */ void secure_rc4_setup1(RC4_CTX *ctx, char *key) {   char res[16]; /* 16 is the size in bytes of the resulting MD5 digest. */       MD5(key, 16, res);   RC4_set_key(ctx, 16, res); }

Note that RC4 does not use an initialization vector.

Another option is to start using RC4, but throw away the first 256 bytes worth of keystream. One easy way to do that is to encrypt 256 bits of garbage and ignore the results:

/* Assumes an already instantiated RC4 context. */ void secure_rc4_setup2(RC4_CTX *ctx) {   char buf[256] = {0,};       RC4(ctx, sizeof(buf), buf, buf);   spc_memset(buf, 0, sizeof(buf)); }


Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++
Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++: Recipes for Cryptography, Authentication, Input Validation & More
ISBN: 0596003943
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 266

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