News  [SoftwareSite

Latest News
Older News
RSS Feed
 
Complete Projects
Useful Classes
Top Downloads
Message Board
AllAPI.net
 
Send Comments
Software License
Mentalis.org Buttons
Donate
 
Forums -> Security Library Forum
 
RC4 encryption: IV  
by Brian [brian_s_clifton at yahoo dot com]
posted on 2003/10/03

On the system i'm working with, we're currently using a COM component for encrypting and decrypting with RC4 which uses the Windows Cryptography API.

I would love to use the mentalis security object to do the job, but I'm not sure what to do about the IV and also how to make the mentalis object work with all of our existing encrypted data (which was all done with the windows cryptography). Has anyone done this before or have some tips?

by Pieter Philippaerts [Pieter at mentalis dot org]
posted on 2003/10/03

The RC4 algorithm is a stream cipher, so it doesn't use an IV. However the IV property is present because the RC4 class inherits it from SymmetricAlgorithm.

The ARCFour class and the RC4CryptoServiceProvider class currently accept 'null' as the IV as well as a byte array of zero or one bytes. For optimal compatibility with other classes such as the CryptoStream class and others, you can use a one-byte array as the IV. The actual value of the byte doesn't matter -- it's completely ignored.

 

Copyright © 2002-2007, The Mentalis.org Team. All rights reserved.
This site is located at http://www.mentalis.org/
Send comments to the webmaster.