GB-RC4: Effective brute force attacks on RC4 algorithm using GPU

Encryption algorithms are applied to a variety of fields and the security of encryption algorithms depends heavily on the computational infeasibility of exhaustive key-space search. RC4 algorithm has an extensive application for stream encryption, however, the disadvantages of traditional RC4 serial algorithm are large computational quantity and slow computation speed, which means a great challenge for throughput of computing system. Graphics processors recently have been widely used as accelerators for high throughput computing. In this paper, GPU is used to improve the efficiency and performance of attacking RC4 algorithm. First, we revised RC4 algorithm to make it easier to parallelize on a GPU. Then we take advantage of constant memory and shared memory in GPU to search the key space of RC4 algorithm efficiently. Besides, we solved the bank conflict problem in shared memory to further improve the performance. Our approach was evaluated in the whole key space of 40-bit, and the results show it can complete searching of the whole key space within 12.8 hours.