this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
533 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
59148 readers
2312 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
the format of the encrypted file can give the attackers an advantage. if your code reads the decrypted file, the attacker can guess the first line is a comment or the name of a setting. a savvy person can combine that with the algorithm to perform a "known plaintext attack", for example by generating a number of possible passwords that would lead to files starting like that.
That's smart. Anyone trying that should definitely have a machine-generated strong password!
That's not quite the definition of known plaintext attack (cryptography nerd here), that's bruteforce with a "crib" to use older terminology (known patterns which allows you to test candidate keys).
A known plaintext attack is defined as an attack on the algorithm to extract the key faster than bruteforce with analytical attacks.