Infoscience

Conference paper

Statistical Attack on RC4: Distinguishing WPA

Sepehrdad, Pouyan; Vaudenay, Serge; Vuagnoux, Martin
  • Presented at: EUROCRYPT 2011, Tallinn, Estonia, May 15-19, 2011
  • Published in: Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2011, vol. 6632, p. 343-363
  • Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6632
  • Springer, 2011

In this paper we construct several tools for manipulating pools of biases in the analysis of RC4. Then, we show that optimized strategies can break WEP based on 4000 packets by assuming that the first bytes of plaintext are known for each packet. We describe similar attacks for WPA. Firstly, we describe a distinguisher for WPA of complexity 2^43 and advantage 0.5 which uses 2^40 packets. Then, based on several partial temporary key recovery attacks, we recover the full 128-bit temporary key by using 2^38 packets. It works within a complexity of 2^96. So far, this is the best attack against WPA. We believe that our analysis brings further insights on the security of RC4.

Keywords: Secret Key ; Keystream Generator ; Stream Cipher ; Permutation ; Weakness ; Bytes ; State ; Bias

Reference

Record created on 2011-05-21, modified on 2012-11-08

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