Near Collisions in the RC4 Stream Cipher

In this paper we explore the intriguing factors involved in the non oneone nature of the RC4, and explore new techniques and present interesting findings regarding the same. The first part of this paper studies near colliding keys of the RC4, and discusses how these keys are localized into clusters in the key-space. The second part of this paper proposes a new collision search algorithm specifically for 16-byte keys. It is generally the practice to choose the byte that differs between two keys to be near the end of the key. However, this is not necessary for 16-byte keys, and the second part of this paper discusses how this may be used to grant us an additional degree of control.