A security administrator has been asked to select a cryptographic algorithm to meet the criteria of a new application. The application utilizes streaming video that can be viewed both on computers…

AES in Electronic Codebook mode encrypts each block independently, causing identical plaintext blocks to produce identical ciphertext and leaking patterns in the stream, making it both insecure and unsuitable for streaming media.

RC4 is a stream cipher and is architecturally incompatible with Cipher Block Chaining mode, which is an operation mode defined only for block ciphers - the combination is not a valid cryptographic construction.

A fixed IV with RC4 means the same keystream is generated every session, allowing an attacker who captures two ciphertexts to XOR them and recover plaintext, rendering the encryption broken.

AES with ciphertext padding is characteristic of block cipher modes such as CBC and introduces computational and size overhead that is unnecessary and counterproductive for low-latency streaming transport.

RC4 is a native stream cipher designed for continuous data streams, and pairing it with a nonce-generated IV prevents keystream reuse, which is RC4's primary practical vulnerability. This combination provides low computational overhead suitable for real-time video delivery on resource-constrained mobile hardware.

AES in Counter (CTR) mode uses an incrementing counter encrypted by AES to generate a keystream, effectively converting the block cipher into a stream cipher without padding or chaining dependencies. CTR mode is fully parallelizable and avoids the latency penalties of block-oriented modes, making it efficient for continuous streaming workloads on both desktop and mobile platforms.