An Efficient and Secure Variant of RC4 Stream Cipher Scheme for Emerging Networks

Data Confidentiality (DC) is considered one of the most important security services. Currently, a set of existing cipher algorithms is being used to ensure DC. However still, designing and implementing a more efficient cipher scheme is always being sought. Moreover, various vulnerabilities are constantly being targeted by new kinds of attacks such as the physical ones. In addition, some cipher algorithms exhibit limitations in terms of latency and required resources, and hence cannot be preferred to constrained devices. This leads to a trade-off between system performance and security level. Towards solving these challenges, we propose a lightweight cipher scheme that ensures a high level of security with minimal latency and resource requirements compared to existing standards such as AES. Specifically, the proposed cipher scheme is based on the original RC4 but adapted and extended by introducing two different round functions that consist of substitutions, addition, and non-invertible diffusion operations to achieve the aforementioned goals. Experimental results indicate that the proposed cipher is a strong and promising stream cipher candidate that has high key sensitivity, high randomness degree, as well as periodicity properties.