Re: The situation at hand and in the future

[Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca>]

>>>>> "Markus" == Markus Törnqvist <mjt@nysv.org> writes:

Markus> On Sat, May 29, 2004 at 08:41:48PM -0400, Hubert Chan wrote:

Markus> This is a lame question, but what does a known-plaintext attack
Markus> imply?

Markus> The cracker wants to know the plaintext passphrase instead of
Markus> some random string whose hash matches the original passphrase's
Markus> hash?

Known plaintext mostly applies to encryption -- I don't know about any
version that applies to hashes.  In known plaintext, the attacker has a
plaintext, and the encrypted data, and is able to retrieve the key from
that.

e.g. if the attacker knows the first several bytes of your file, they
may be able to retrieve the key and decrypt the rest of the file.

-- 
Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca> - http://www.uhoreg.ca/
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