Abstract. Here we study a weakness of the RC4 Key Scheduling Algorithm (KSA) that has already been noted by Mantin and Mironov. Consider the RC4 permutation S of N (usually 256) bytes and denote it by SN after the KSA. Under reasonable assumptions we present a simple proof that each permutation byte after the KSA is significantly biased (either positive or negative) towards many values in the range