On the Security of RC4 in TLS and WPA – Full Paper Released

Re:On the Security of RC4 in TLS and WPA – Full Paper Released by agwa on Monday July 08, 2013 @05:02PM (#6009272)

Except that's not going to happen because for now the only viable alternative to RC4 in TLS is AES in CBC mode, which suffers from its own problems (BEAST and Lucky 13). It's really a question of which is worse, and that's not so easily answered.

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Re:On the Security of RC4 in TLS and WPA – Full Paper Released by marshray on Monday July 08, 2013 @05:57PM (#6009614)

The RC4 attacks currently require the client being attacked to make millions of connections to the legitimate server. However, this could be done over a long period of time and the webserver may not even log an error for each attempt.

Under the right circumstances, BEAST can be exploited with a real-time practical number of connections. It was demoed on stage. Those circumstances don't include every browser configuration, but they're not very extraordinary.

Does that answer your question? :-)

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Re:On the Security of RC4 in TLS and WPA – Full Paper Released by tptacek on Monday July 08, 2013 @06:15PM (#6009714)

The circumstances BEAST relies on involves a rapidly diminishing set of browsers. As I understand it, BEAST is less of a motivator for RC4 than Lucky 13.

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Re:On the Security of RC4 in TLS and WPA – Full Paper Released by marshray on Tuesday July 09, 2013 @02:53PM (#6014491)

Never thought I'd see the day when browsers are patched (against BEAST) faster than servers (Lucky 13).

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