Re: [TLS] Prohibiting RC4 Cipher Suites

[Andrei Popov <[e-mail]>]

Hi Kenny,

Thanks for your comments; I will update the attack description and the link in the next revision of the draft.

Cheers,

Andrei

-----Original Message-----
From: Paterson, Kenny [mailto:[e-mail]] 
Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2013 2:13 PM
To: Andrei Popov; [e-mail]
Subject: Re: [TLS] Prohibiting RC4 Cipher Suites

Andrei,

Your intro says:

"Recent cryptanalysis results [ALF] exploit biases in the RC4 keystream to recover early portions of plaintexts."


The attacks can recover repeated plaintext from ANYWHERE in the plaintext stream, so they are more flexible in application than your text suggests.

Another (better?) link for the attacks by AlFardan et al. is www.isg.rhul.ac.uk/tls. The "official" USENIX link, which should be long-lasting, is:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity13/security-rc4-tls


Best wishes

Kenny

On 21/08/2013 13:59, "Andrei Popov" <[e-mail]> wrote:

>Hello All,
> 
>RC4 is a widely deployed cipher, which is commonly preferred by TLS
>servers: our tests show ~40% of the high-traffic HTTPS sites pick RC4 
>if IE offers this cipher. A significant percentage of web sites and 
>e-mail servers have only RC4 enabled,  so a client cannot altogether 
>disable RC4 without breaking interoperability. At the same time, 
>attacks on RC4 are improving (e.g.
>http://www.isg.rhul.ac.uk/tls/), to the point that practical exploits 
>are possible.
> 
>I have posted a new Internet-Draft ³Prohibiting RC4 Cipher Suites²
>(draft-popov-tls-prohibiting-rc4-00
><http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-popov-tls-prohibiting-rc4/>) to 
>deprecate the use of RC4 cipher suites in TLS.
> 
>Looking forward to comments and feedback on the draft,
> 
>Andrei Popov
>