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Beyond RC4 for Windows Authentication

16 pointsby e12etoday at 5:14 PM2 commentsview on HN

Comments

Refreeze5224today at 6:26 PM

The main reason this is significant is that it makes Kerberoasting much more difficult. It's less about how secure RC4 is as a cipher, and more how fast you can compute it in a bruteforce dictionary attack, vs the modern AES version.

adzmtoday at 5:35 PM

It is surprising how long RC4 has lasted, honestly. Though it should have been dropped by everything long, long ago. That said, I remember when it came back for a short amount of time due to the BEAST attack which affected block ciphers in CBC mode. It's interesting that nowadays the most recommended mode of operation is galois/counter mode (GCM) which effectively turns 128-bit block ciphers into streams again.