Re: Time to exhaustively break 40-bit RC4?

[eric@remailer.net (Eric Hughes)]

   From: "Ian Farquhar" <ianf@sydney.sgi.com>

   No, because as you're doing an exhaustive keysearch, you can "pipeline"
   the key generation process in software.  Each key requires 256 swaps,
   certainly, but there are only two swaps difference between the key
   for "0000000000" and "0000000001" (assuming a 40 bit key).  

Not by my count.  The key data length for a forty bit key is only 5.
That means that each byte of the key data is used about fifty times in
key setup (256/5).  Those initial changes in the internal key
permutation table then propagate under iteration.

Now I haven't looked very closely at how to optimize this search, and
it's not even clear that it's possible.  There are 256! possible
permutations for the internal key, which is a lot more than 2^40
possible (external) keys.  It's quite possible that the internal keys
are just not particularly close to each other.  Close here, say, is
the minimum number of swaps needed to take one key to another.

It's possible that some arrangement other than incrementing the key
yields internal key correlations that speed up software internal key
generation.

Eric