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Re: What can an attacker see in an encrypted message?

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On 05-10-2015 13:02, Anonymous Remailer (austria) wrote:
> After seeing all of the cryptanalysis on the ng recently it occurs
> to me to ask, just how much can an attacker figure out from a
> ciphertext? What if he or she has some of the passphrase? Here I'm
> talking about a ciphertext created using one of the algorithms
> available in gpg.

I'm just adding to Richard's reply here because I don't think he 
stressed some of these points enough.

The cyphers we have been toying with here in sci.crypt are just that: 
toy cyphers. They are good for an amateur cryptographer to spend a few 
hours trying to break them, but aren't good for anything else.

On a decent cypher, like AES, if you are trying out random keys and test 
a key that has 127 out of 128 bits correct (i.e., has a single bit 
wrong), you still end up with random garbage as the output.

So you either get the key completely right or it's just wrong, and any 
wrong key should be just as bad as another, no matter how many bits are 
wrong.

-- 
Paulo Marques - www.grupopie.com

"'thinking outside the box' works better if I know what's inside the box."

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What can an attacker see in an encrypted message? "Anonymous Remailer (austria)" <mixmaster@remailer.privacy.at> - 2015-10-05 14:02 +0200
  Re: What can an attacker see in an encrypted message? Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> - 2015-10-05 13:39 +0100
  Re: What can an attacker see in an encrypted message? Paulo Marques <pmarques@grupopie.com> - 2015-10-05 14:19 +0100
  Re: What can an attacker see in an encrypted message? William Unruh <unruh@invalid.ca> - 2015-10-05 20:46 +0000
  Re: What can an attacker see in an encrypted message? Robert Wessel <robertwessel2@yahoo.com> - 2015-10-05 22:39 -0500
    Re: What can an attacker see in an encrypted message? Jakob Bohm <jb-usenet@wisemo.com> - 2015-10-06 08:01 +0200
      Re: What can an attacker see in an encrypted message? PA7PTL <PA7PTL@panteltje.com> - 2015-10-06 07:07 +0000
        Re: What can an attacker see in an encrypted message? Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2015-10-06 11:22 +0100
          Re: What can an attacker see in an encrypted message? eugene.styer@gmail.com - 2015-10-06 08:48 -0700
    Re: What can an attacker see in an encrypted message? Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> - 2015-10-06 10:15 +0100
  Re: What can an attacker see in an encrypted message? Jeffrey Goldberg <nobody@goldmark.org> - 2015-10-06 11:22 -0500
    Re: What can an attacker see in an encrypted message? Jakob Bohm <jb-usenet@wisemo.com> - 2015-10-06 20:12 +0200
      Re: What can an attacker see in an encrypted message? Jeffrey Goldberg <nobody@goldmark.org> - 2015-10-07 19:21 -0500
        Re: What can an attacker see in an encrypted message? Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> - 2015-10-08 06:33 +0100
          Re: What can an attacker see in an encrypted message? Jeffrey Goldberg <nobody@goldmark.org> - 2015-10-08 22:21 -0500
            Re: What can an attacker see in an encrypted message? Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> - 2015-10-09 07:34 +0100
  Re: What can an attacker see in an encrypted message? Anonymous <anonymous@foto.nl1.torservers.net> - 2015-10-07 09:20 -0400

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