Intelligent security in the era of AI: The key vulnerability of RC4 algorithm

Abstract

Communication methods in the world are constantly evolving, this means that the amounts of data sent through open networks are in populated quantities, so there must be means to protect that data sent, and this could be done by information protection systems by encryption and coding of the data in order to protect the content of that data sent. The main aim of encrypting and encoding data is to protect the integrity of the data, and also to ensure the confidentiality of the data source, this is done through the use of algorithms for encryption and encoding the data, with the aim of changing its content using those algorithms and returning its original content with the same algorithms used to encrypt it, through a symmetric secret key for encryption and decryption. In this paper, the researcher highlights the weakness of the basic RC4 algorithm, which lies in the stability of the key used in scheduling the key, as a prelude to generating the stream keys used in serial byte encryption, so the RC4-Pr algorithm was modified by adding an additional permutation function by performing a key permutation operation to produce a different key in each 16-bytes (128-bits) cipher round.