In Memoriam: Goodbye to RC4, an Old Crypto Favorite

Misty-eyed old-timers are mourning the passing of one of the world’s most elegant encryption algorithms. RC4 was designed by Ron Rivest in the late 1980s. Initially, RC4 was a proprietary trade secret of RSA Security. Perhaps due to the algorithm’s simplicity (you can keep it in your head), it leaked out into the Internet in the 1990s where it became the de facto TLS bulk encryption protocol for over a decade.