Text weighting is useful for quickly finding the key in brute force attacks. You can verify that you have the correct key at the speed of light.
As a simplistic example if you were to assign an LED to each position in a ciphertext, then try each possible key turning on LEDs only when the character assigned is equal to a space..
A good test of a crypto system is the amount of random data that is used to encrypt/decrypt.
If everybody downloaded a copy of a crypto system that was the same, and used it without providing random data all copies would scramble exactly the same way.
The German Enigma cipher only used enough random data to produce about 19600-531400 possible unique keys.
The theoretical random setting of three or four rotors each having 27 characters of the alphabet provided the random factor. The rest of the enigma machine was hardwired and would substitute characters in a fixed knowable way.
Minimal contemporary crypto systems use enough random data to produce at least 2^72 unique keys. As technology is bringing the cost of cracking these systems lower and lower these large numbers will soon seem ridiculously small.
It could be argued that many contemporary crypto systems use pseudorandom data to encrypt. Often times the actual number of likely keys produced is a subset of the theoretical number possible.
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Text weighting is useful for quickly finding the key in brute force attacks. You can verify that you have the correct key at the speed of light.
t 0s0phiticat3d!
As a simplistic example if you were to assign an LED to each position in a ciphertext, then try each possible key turning on LEDs only when the character assigned is equal to a space..
N0typinglik3thiswouldn'thelpth3s3syst3msar3much
A good test of a crypto system is the amount of random data that is used to encrypt/decrypt.
If everybody downloaded a copy of a crypto system that was the same, and used it without providing random data all copies would scramble exactly the same way.
The German Enigma cipher only used enough random data to produce about 19600-531400 possible unique keys.
The theoretical random setting of three or four rotors each having 27 characters of the alphabet provided the random factor. The rest of the enigma machine was hardwired and would substitute characters in a fixed knowable way.
Minimal contemporary crypto systems use enough random data to produce at least 2^72 unique keys. As technology is bringing the cost of cracking these systems lower and lower these large numbers will soon seem ridiculously small.
It could be argued that many contemporary crypto systems use pseudorandom data to encrypt. Often times the actual number of likely keys produced is a subset of the theoretical number possible.