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Discovering an RC4 anomaly through visualization

Published: 03 November 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Visualization can be an effective means for analyzing security data and teaching students different concepts about various security algorithms. At the Air Force Academy, interactive visualizations are used to teach ciphers to students in a cryptography course. In the course of preparing student visualizations about the RC4 cipher characteristics, an anomaly was discovered in the basic encryption algorithm. This paper describes the anomaly and the process of how it was discovered through visualization.

References

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Mantin, Itsak, Analysis of the Stream Cipher RC4, Master's Thesis, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, November 2001.
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McCormick, B.H. Visualization in scientific computing. SIGBIO Newsl. 10, 1 (Mar. 1988), 15--21.
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R.L. Rivest. The RC4 encryption algorithm. RSA Data Security, Inc., Mar. 12, 1992.
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Schneier B., "Section 17.1 RC4," Applied Cryptography, Second Edition, John Wiley & Sons, 1996.
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Schweitzer D., Baird L., Collins M., Brown W., Sherman M., GRASP: A visualization tool for teaching security protocols, Proceedings of the 10th Colloquium for Information Systems Security Education, June 2006.
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Schweitzer D., Baird L., The design and use of interactive visualization applets for teaching ciphers, Proceedings of the 7th IEEE Workshop on Information Assurance, June 2006
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Tufte E., The visual display of quantitative information, Graphics Press, Cheshire, CT, 1986.
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Wilson J., Aiken, R., and Katz, I. 1996. Review of animation systems for algorithm understanding. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference on integrating Technology into Computer Science Education (Barcelona, Spain, June 02-06, 1996). ITiCSE '96, pp. 75--77.

Cited By

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  • (2011)OpenConflictProceedings of the 2011 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy10.1109/SP.2011.28(506-520)Online publication date: 22-May-2011
  • (2009)A security framework for e-Health service authentication and e-Health data transmission2009 9th International Symposium on Communications and Information Technology10.1109/ISCIT.2009.5341116(1213-1218)Online publication date: Sep-2009
  • (2008)Toward a Scalable Visualization System for Network Traffic MonitoringIEICE - Transactions on Information and Systems10.1093/ietisy/e91-d.5.1300E91-D:5(1300-1310)Online publication date: 1-May-2008

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cover image ACM Conferences
VizSEC '06: Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Visualization for computer security
November 2006
138 pages
ISBN:1595935495
DOI:10.1145/1179576
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 03 November 2006

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Author Tags

  1. algorithm analysis
  2. cryptography
  3. visualization

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Cited By

View all
  • (2011)OpenConflictProceedings of the 2011 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy10.1109/SP.2011.28(506-520)Online publication date: 22-May-2011
  • (2009)A security framework for e-Health service authentication and e-Health data transmission2009 9th International Symposium on Communications and Information Technology10.1109/ISCIT.2009.5341116(1213-1218)Online publication date: Sep-2009
  • (2008)Toward a Scalable Visualization System for Network Traffic MonitoringIEICE - Transactions on Information and Systems10.1093/ietisy/e91-d.5.1300E91-D:5(1300-1310)Online publication date: 1-May-2008

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