On Mon, 2006-05-22 at 16:22 -0500, chrisisbd@leary.csoft.net wrote:
You can *only* brute force surely if you know a significant chunk of the result of decrypting the data before you start, otherwise how does the brute force approach know when it's got a hit?
There are a few ways I could think to do this...
Once is the enigma approach that I mentioned in a previous message, but that won't work against modern encryption.
If we are talking about files, then you just keep rotating until you see what looks like a valid common file header (of course here, knowing what sort of file you are dealing with would help).
If we are talking about encoded text then working against a simplified dictionary might do the trick.
If we are talking about a whole filesystem, then is there any filesystem structure or checksums that might help ?