Re: Working on ARC4-16 bit

From: Giorgio (giorgio_at_bignami.zzn.com)
Date: 05/27/04 

Date: 27 May 2004 02:04:03 -0700

Well, i'm sorry about what happened with Tom St Denis, i have esteem
of him and personally i had found interesting many of his posts here.
I think it was caused only by a banal misunderstanding on the fact
that i'm not trowing on the table a fantasy algorithm, but that i'm
simply trying to focus the discussion on the very same ARC4-16
algorithm starting from what i had found about it in the past, since
for what i had found it wasn't discussed in an exaustive way. I
exposed many of my doubts in previous posts so i'm not repeating now.
About ARC4-16 Scott Fluhrer said in 2000 that "After all, 8 bit RC4
itself is quite a handfull, and until we have a fruitful attack
against that, it doesn't make much sense to start attacking something
that appears to be considerably harder."
4 years later maybe we could focus angain about it, entry level
computers are more than enough powerful to do it in reasonable times,
also with my not so original suggestion to avoid the most obvious
possible fault in ARC16 since the biggest state array size.
Agreeding with Tom St Denis yes, AES is good and since it has ben
deeply tested by highly qualified matematicians and cryptoanalists it
will probably be good for a lot, but ARC4-16 would not be a trivial
project since should allow a very strongher encryption with a really
simple and speedy code.
Only detailed discusion and trial about it may say if this encryption
is really good as it seem for many people, i think is not a work for a
brain alone, and however a cryptoanalisys is not serious or complete
if it's not done in team with as wide as possible pool of competences
and also sheer "point of wiew".
Expecially seems that ARC4-16 will reasonably allow to use huge 128KB
keys making even plain brute forcing ways harder than on AES; brute
forcing will very proably become always more easy with more powerful
new machines, there are no good reasons to think computing power will
not boost in the future, and imho cryptoanalists must always think to
the worst case possible.
However ARC4-n and AES are basically different cyphers and they may
reveal in the future to have different best usages, so i think that's
quite not proper to say that a "perfect" cypher for all usage may
exist and that it will make useless all other cypers, otherwise i
agree with Tom St Denis that serious research must proceed in a
rational way.

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