April Win10 cumulative security update: Edge/IE11 browser stopped supporting RC4 encryption

In September 2015, Microsoft released a message that Win10 Edge and IE11 browsers will stop supporting RC4 encryption algorithms earlier this year. Now, Microsoft has determined that this change will take effect in the April cumulative security update. With this update, Win10 Edge and IE11 browsers will be on par with their peers.

RC4 is a variable-length stream encryption algorithm designed by American cryptographer Ronald · Ron Rivest in 1987. It has long been recognized that there are loopholes in the RC4 encryption algorithm. In 2013, scientists have designed an attack method that exploits this vulnerability, but it takes 2,000 hours to crack. Nowadays, with the advancement of technology, the time required for cracking is getting shorter and shorter, and the current cracking time has been reduced from thousands of hours to several days. Therefore, major browser vendors finally decided to stop supporting the RC4 algorithm.

Microsoft recommends that Web services that are still using the RC4 algorithm abandon this algorithm as soon as possible. For the vast majority of users, there is not much impact, because the proportion of Web services still using this algorithm is very small.

The Edge/IE11 browser will stop supporting RC4 encryption and it will be introduced here.