Chet Atkins

Arcfour , meaning “ Allegedly RC4 ” (“RC4 supposed ”) is a symmetrical algorithm of Chiffrement equivalent with RC4. Until 1994, RC4 was an industrial secrecy preserved by RSA Data Security, Inc. The code of the algorithm then appeared anonymously on a Mailing list and then on the newsgroup sci.crypt . This version, probably resulting from a dismantling or an analysis of a material implementation, was named " Arcfour" to avoid the legal problems, the name of RC4 being deposited. Several experiments quickly confirmed that Arcfour produced the same exits as RC4. As the algorithm never had been patented, Arcfour entered the public domain.

It seems that the implementations " non-officielles" are legal in so far as they do not use mark RC4. Since, Arcfour became synonymous with RC4 and the two algorithms are regarded as identical. The libraries which place at the disposal of the cryptographic primitives based on RC4 mention the algorithm under the term of Arcfour in their documentation (for example GNU-Crypto).

See too

External bonds

  • Gnu-Crypto has an implementation of ARCFour

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