alt Hacker NewsThere are very few computer-era symmetric ciphers that were truly broken. RC4 is probably the worst example.
There are no reasonable attacks even on the good old DES. And by "reasonable" I mean attacks that would bring down the complexity to a practical level if the DES key size were to be extended to something like 128 bits. We can brute-force DES keys trivially, but that's not a fault of the cipher per se.
RC4 is a good example of what Aumasson means when he jokes about weak symmetric cryptography being a quirk of history. It's genuinely weird that RC4 was as popular as it was! DES is broken because it's small, with tiny keys and an 8-byte block. But if it had 16-byte keys and blocks, and presumably a higher round count, the only dealbreaker with it might be that it'd be slow.