IMPLEMENTATION OF RC4 ALGORITHM FOR SECURED WIRELESS COMMUNICATION

RC4 is a popular stream cipher, which is widely used in many security protocols and standards due to its speed and flexibility. An efficient and high throughput hardware implementation of the RC4 algorithm. The main idea of the proposed architecture is the utilization of a tri-port RAM to reduce the memory resource and to increase throughput. The proposed design requires two clock cycles for generating one byte of ciphering key and uses only a block of 256 bytes RAM. These result in 50% increment of system throughput and three times reduction of RAM resource compared to the recent architectures. The proposed implementation supports variable key length from 8 to 128 bits and achieves 80 MB/s throughput at 160 MHz operating frequency. It aims to support the WEP security in the MAC layer of 600 Mbps 4×4 MIMO wireless LAN system based on IEEE 802.11n standard. The RC4 stream cipher is used in the security protocol WEP in IEEE 802.11b wireless network. The proposed design is also more efficient in terms of power consumption.