RC42's innovative way for data security in wireless data communication

摘要

Several algorithms for data encryption in wireless data communication have been proposed by many researchers, which include the RC4 encryption technique presently used in wireless local area network (WLAN). It has been proven that the RC4 used in wired equivalent privacy (WEP) of WLAN is vulnerable to attacks. These vulnerabilities create the potential for active and passive attacks which could allow attackers to decrypt encrypted data in wireless network. The vulnerabilities of WEP had been investigated. It was discovered that the main weakness of WEP lie solely on the RC4 encrypting procedure. In spite of general condemnation of RC4 used in WLAN, its simplicity and general acceptance make it attractive. Therefore, there is a need to enhance its operability by developing an improved encryption technique which inherits the simplicity, efficiency and not vulnerable to attacks as RC4. RC42's which is an improvement on RC4 is proposed in this paper.