Solving for the RC4 stream cipher state register using a genetic algorithm
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The RC4 stream cipher has shown to be quite resilient to cryptanalysis for the 26 years it has been around. The algorithm is still one of the most widely used methods of encryption over the Internet today being implemented through the Secure Socket Layer and Transport Layer Security protocols. Genetic algorithms are a sub-class of evolutionary algorithms that have been used to help solve many different problems of optimization in a variety of disciplines. In this paper we will examine the abilities of the genetic algorithm as a tool to help solve the permutation that is stored as the state register of the RC4 stream cipher. Finally, we will show that on average the genetic algorithm can solve 100% of the keystream in 2121:5 generations.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it