Topic summary
Cryptographic attack
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Cryptanalysis.
Overview
The goal of cryptanalysis is for a third party, a cryptanalyst, to gain as much information as possible about the original ("plaintext"), attempting to "break" the encryption to read the ciphertext and learning the secret key so future messages can be decrypted and read. A mathematical technique to do this is called a cryptographic attack. Cryptographic attacks can be characterized in a number of ways: