A Proposed Modification on RC4 Algorithm by Increasing its Randomness

Abstract

Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol was adopted as security protocol to protect IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN from unauthorized access, eavesdropping and other attacks. Over the past few years, several serious security flaws discovered in WEP protocol and its underlying cryptographic primitives (data integrity and encryption algorithms). These flaws lead to a number of practical attacks that demonstrate that WEP fails to achieve its security goals. In this research an attempt is accomplish to improve the encryption algorithm “Standard RC4” of WEP protocol through proposing an enhanced algorithm named as “Proposed RC4+S” that would overcome the security flaws and strengthen the level of security and protection for WEP protocol. Then evaluate the proposed algorithm “RC4+S” to prove the advance of research proposal, which illustrated through the following result: the proposed RC4+S algorithm increases (secret-key) the randomness by approximately more than (20%), thus leading to improve output (ciphertext) randomness of modified WEP protocol compared to standard protocol.