Analysis of RC4 crypts using PSO based swarm technique

Abstract

RC4 Cryptosystem is a nonlinear byte level encryption system. This is the most widely used cryptosystem, created by Rivest for RSA Securities Inc. This has two modules known as Pseudo-Random number Generator and Key Scheduler. Key scheduler transforms an initial permutation to a random key permutation. Computational Swarm Intelligence (CSI) is a popular branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI). CSI-based techniques have been used to solve many hard problems of optimization. In this research paper, Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (DPSO)-based novel technique is applied to solve RC4 stream cipher-based crypts. Authors attempt to find key bits using DPSO-based swarm technique to reduce the number of exhaustive searches significantly. According to obtained results, correct Key bits are computed for the crypts of length 100–300 characters.