3 ms·

It's worth noting that that Jacob Appelbaum, who has worked on the Snowden documents alongside Laura Poitras, claims that TLS has been broken in real time by th

• tptacek 13y ago
  Never say never, but, this seems unlikely. The nature of the RC4 flaw isn't such that attackers grind on a single ciphertext with fast compute. The problem is rather a series of statistical biases that recur at intervals in the keystream. The time you spend attacking RC4 isn't due to compute, but rather due to the number of samples you need to collect to leverage the biases to recover plaintext. You can imagine improvements on the attack that would require fewer samples, but probably not improvements that would get you down to double-digit samples. There may indeed be a lot of room for attacks on RC4 to improve, and improve in ways that outpace (nonexistent) countermeasures. I think RC4 is scarier than CBC padding timing. But a real-time attack on RC4 would seem to imply a radically different attack on RC4 than any the literature has hinted at.