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That earth-shattering NSA crypto-cracking: Have spooks smashed RC4?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09...lrun_analysis/

Although reports from the New York Times and its allied publications held off on the specifics, it may all mean that US spooks can reliably crack RC4, a popular encryption cipher, security experts fear.

Tough ciphers, such as 256-bit AES, remain unbroken by the g-men, it's hoped. Snowden himself famously said "encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on".

RC4 is an ageing but still widely used stream cipher that's often used as a component of Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocols of HTTPS to protect sensitive web traffic from snooping. Security researchers have shown data encrypted by the algorithm can be carefully analysed to silently extract information, such as an authentication cookie used to log into a victim's Gmail account.