1994 Articles

A Programmable Plaintext Recognizer

Wagner, David A.; Bellovin, Steven Michael

Other researchers have studied the feasibility of a brute force attack on DES using several known plaintexts. In practice, know plaintext/ciphertext pairs may not be readily available, but statistical information about similar plaintexts is much more easily aquired. Accordingly, we design a statistical plaintext recognizer suitable for use in a ciphertext-only key search machine. Software simulations indicate that this design gives a powerful attack on the encryption of low-entropy data.