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45 lines
1.8 KiB
Plaintext
45 lines
1.8 KiB
Plaintext
The RC4 library.
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RC4 is a stream cipher that operates on a byte stream. It can be used with
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any length key but I would recommend normally using 16 bytes.
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This library requires the inclusion of 'rc4.h'.
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The RC4 encryption function takes what is called an RC4_KEY as an argument.
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The RC4_KEY is generated by the RC4_set_key function from the key bytes.
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RC4, being a stream cipher, does not have an encryption or decryption mode.
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It produces a stream of bytes that the input stream is xor'ed against and
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so decryption is just a case of 'encrypting' again with the same key.
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I have only put in one 'mode' for RC4 which is the normal one. This means
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there is no initialisation vector and there is no feedback of the cipher
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text into the cipher. This implies that you should not ever use the
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same key twice if you can help it. If you do, you leave yourself open to
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known plain text attacks; if you know the plain text and
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corresponding cipher text in one message, all messages that used the same
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key can have the cipher text decoded for the corresponding positions in the
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cipher stream.
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The main positive feature of RC4 is that it is a very fast cipher; about 4
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times faster that DES. This makes it ideally suited to protocols where the
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key is randomly chosen, like SSL.
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The functions are as follows:
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void RC4_set_key(
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RC4_KEY *key;
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int len;
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unsigned char *data);
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This function initialises the RC4_KEY structure with the key passed
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in 'data', which is 'len' bytes long. The key data can be any
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length but 16 bytes seems to be a good number.
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void RC4(
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RC4_KEY *key;
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unsigned long len;
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unsigned char *in;
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unsigned char *out);
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Do the actual RC4 encryption/decryption. Using the 'key', 'len'
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bytes are transformed from 'in' to 'out'. As mentioned above,
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decryption is the operation as encryption.
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