ISAAC (cipher)

ISAAC (indirection, shift, accumulate, add, and count) is a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator and a stream cipher designed by Robert J. Jenkins Jr. in 1993. The reference implementation source code was dedicated to the public domain.

The ISAAC algorithm has similarities with RC4. It uses an array of 256 four-octet integers as the internal state, writing the results to another 256 four-octet integer array, from which they are read one at a time until empty, at which point they are recomputed. The computation consists of altering i-element with (i⊕128)-element, two elements of the state array found by indirection, an accumulator, and a counter, for all values of i from 0 to 255. Since it only takes about 19 32-bit operations for each 32-bit output word, it is very fast on 32-bit computers.

Cryptanalysis has been undertaken by Marina Pudovkina (2001). Her attack can recover the initial state with a complexity that is approximated to be less than the time needed for searching through the square root of all possible initial states. In practice this means that the attack needs ${\displaystyle 4.67\times 10^{1240}}$ instead of ${\displaystyle 10^{2466}}$. This result has had no practical impact on the security of ISAAC.

...
Wikipedia