Encryption Attacks

Frequency Analysis

Involves looking at the blocks of an encrypted message to determine if any common patterns exist

Known plain text

Relies on the attacker having pairs of known plain text along with the corresponding ciphertext. This gives the attacker a place to start attempting to derive the key

Chosen plain text

The attacker obtains the ciphertexts corresponding to a set of plain texts of their own choosing. This allows the attacker to attempt to derive the key used and thus decrypt other messages encrypted with that key

Related key attack

This is like a chosen plain-text attack, except the attacker can obtain ciphertexts encrypted under two different keys

Birthday Attack

is a cryptographic attack that uses probability theory, specifically the birthday problem, to find hash collisions. It exploits the high probability that two different inputs will produce the same hash value, similar to how in a group of 23 people, there's a 50% chance that two will share the same birthday

Downgrade attack

Used against secure communications such as TLS in an attempt to get the user or system to inadvertently shift to less secure cryptographic modes. The idea is to trick the user into shifting to a less secure version of the protocol