4 ms·

How do you know they're not one-time pads?

• stephengillie 14y ago
  What if we try every possible combination of one-time pads? This is like sculpting with Michelangelo - the correct pattern exists, we just have to remove all of the incorrect patterns from the patternspace.
  • iso-8859-1 14y ago
    With one time pads, you can decrypt it to anything, it all depends on the key. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad#Attempt_at_cryptanalysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad#Attempt_at_cryptan... What am I missing here?
    • stephengillie 14y ago
      So use all keys. Then sort the result and continue to brute-force the correct output. How many billions of NTLM keys can a Geforce crack in a second? How is this cryptography problem so greatly different than that one?
      • perokreco 14y ago
        You are missing that when bruteforcing a one time pad you will get all possible arrangements of all letters. How do you tell all the plausible looking strings apart? What kind of a sort function could you apply?
      • marshray 14y ago
        > How many billions of NTLM keys can a Geforce crack in a second? According to https://hashcat.net/oclhashcat-plus/ https://hashcat.net/oclhashcat-plus/ , it's approximately 2.5 B. This corresponds to a one time pad message of just under 4 bytes long. The difference, of course, with NTLM is you know when you've found the right value. With OTPs, all decryptions are possible and equally valid.