Both (BEAST and RC4) are proven to be real. The only question is which is worse, and if the attacks are practical. In my view, both are equally unlikely to be a

Both (BEAST and RC4) are proven to be real. The only question is which is worse, and if the attacks are practical. In my view, both are equally unlikely to be a threat for an average web site. I'd love to get rid of the BEAST penalty, but there are no good (high-volume) stats on what percentage of "all" users is vulnerable to the BEAST attack. Because Apple is not yet deploying 1/n-1 in their browsers, the vulnerable BEAST percentage is still quite high. On SSL Labs, about 15%. Given that attacks against RC4 are not very practical (yet), one possible direction is to focus on supporting TLS 1.2 (without RC4, obviously), at which point both RC4 and BEAST attacks will become irrelevant.