Printer Friendly
Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Thesaurus - The Free Dictionary
1,764,623,594 visitors served.
forum mailing list For webmasters
?
New: Language forums
Dictionary/
thesaurus
Medical
dictionary
Legal
dictionary
Financial
dictionary
Acronyms
 
Idioms
Encyclopedia
Wikipedia
encyclopedia
?

RC4
(redirected from Arcfour)

   Also found in: Wikipedia 0.02 sec.

RC4

See RC algorithms.


(cryptography)RC4 - A cipher designed by RSA Data Security, Inc. which can accept keys of arbitrary length, and is essentially a pseudo random number generator with the output of the generator being XORed with the data stream to produce the encrypted data. For this reason, it is very important that the same RC4 key never be used to encrypt two different data streams. The encryption mechanism used to be a trade secret, until someone posted source code for an algorithm onto Usenet News, claiming it to be equivalent to RC4. The algorithm is very fast, its security is unknown, but breaking it does not seem trivial either. There is very strong evidence that the posted algorithm is indeed equivalent to RC4.

The United States government routinely approves RC4 with 40-bit keys for export. Keys this small can be easily broken by governments, criminals, and amateurs. The exportable version of Netscape's Secure Socket Layer, which uses RC4-40, was broken by at least two independent groups. Breaking it took about eight days; in many universities or companies the same computing power is available to any computer science student.

See also Damien Doligez's SSL cracking page, RC4 Source and Information, SSLeay, Crypto++, Ssh, A collection of articles.


How to thank TFD for its existence? Tell a friend about us, add a link to this page, add the site to iGoogle, or visit webmaster's page for free fun content.
?Page tools
Printer friendly
Cite / link
Email
Feedback
? Mentioned in ? References in periodicals archive
 
Secure AES(256/192/128), 3DES, Blowfish, CAST128, ARCFOUR or ARCTWO data encryption across the LAN via SSH and SSL
These include FTP, SSH1 or SSH2 File Transfer Protocols, DES, ARCFour, Blowfish and more.
The BCM5820 also accelerates the ARCFOUR, 3DES and DES symmetric algorithms and supports MD-5, SHA-1, and random number generation through a 32/64 bit, 33/66 MHz PCI 2.
 
Encyclopedia browser? ? Full browser
 
 
Encyclopedia
?

Disclaimer | Privacy policy | Feedback | Copyright © 2009 Farlex, Inc.
All content on this website, including dictionary, thesaurus, literature, geography, and other reference data is for informational purposes only. This information should not be considered complete, up to date, and is not intended to be used in place of a visit, consultation, or advice of a legal, medical, or any other professional. Terms of Use.