RC4

This document deprecates RC4 in Secure Shell (SSH). Therefore, this document formally moves RFC 4345 to Historic status.

The triple-DES (3DES) and RC4 encryption types are steadily weakening in cryptographic strength, and the deprecation process should begin for their use in Kerberos. Accordingly, RFC 4757 has been moved to Historic status, as none of the encryption types it specifies should be used, and RFC 3961 has been updated to note the deprecation of the triple-DES encryption types. RFC 4120 is likewise updated to remove the recommendation to implement triple-DES encryption and checksum types.

This document requires that Transport Layer Security (TLS) clients and servers never negotiate the use of RC4 cipher suites when they establish connections. This applies to all TLS versions. This document updates RFCs 5246, 4346, and 2246.

The Kerberos 5 network authentication protocol, originally specified in RFC 1510, can use the Data Encryption Standard (DES) for encryption. Almost 30 years after first publishing DES, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finally withdrew the standard in 2005, reflecting a long-established consensus that DES is insufficiently secure. By 2008, commercial hardware costing less than USD 15,000 could break DES keys in less than a day on average. DES is long past its sell-by date. Accordingly, this document updates RFC 1964, RFC 4120, RFC 4121, and RFC 4757 to deprecate the use of DES, RC4-HMAC-EXP, and other weak cryptographic algorithms in Kerberos. Because RFC 1510 (obsoleted by RFC 4120) supports only DES, this document recommends the reclassification of RFC 1510 as Historic. This memo documents an Internet Best Current Practice.

This document contains test vectors for the stream cipher RC4. This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes.

The Microsoft Windows 2000 implementation of Kerberos introduces a new encryption type based on the RC4 encryption algorithm and using an MD5 HMAC for checksum. This is offered as an alternative to using the existing DES-based encryption types.

The RC4-HMAC encryption types are used to ease upgrade of existing Windows NT environments, provide strong cryptography (128-bit key lengths), and provide exportable (meet United States government export restriction requirements) encryption. This document describes the implementation of those encryption types. This memo provides information for the Internet community.

This document specifies methods of using the Arcfour cipher in the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol that mitigate the weakness of the cipher's key-scheduling algorithm. [STANDARDS-TRACK]