Hi folks, Does anyone here know of any computer-based aids for breaking classical cryptosystems? I'm thinking in particular of the ones in "Body of Secrets", which are so short that I really hope they're monoalphabetic substitutions. But I'm interested in these sorts of programs more generally. I could use paper, but it'd be nice if a computer could keep track of what I've tried and otherwise ruled out. I am aware of the "crypt breaker's workbench", but that's specific to classic Unix crypt(3). What else is there?
Incidentally, if anyone's interested, on my web page I have an article on how I used classical techniques to recover files encrypted with CFS and corrupted by disk failure or human error. It's sort of a rambling stream-of-consciousness that I wrote while learning CFS and breaking the encryption. It's not often that one gets to use classical methods against a modern cryptosystem, so I figure it may be refreshing. To summarize, CFS XORs each file against an eight-byte IV that is stored as a dangling symlink, and on my system the symlinks had become desynchronized from the files. PDF: http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2004-08/pdfs/howard.pdf TXT: http://www.lightconsulting.com/~travis/cfs_travails.txt -- "I sometimes have delusions of adequacy" -- Woody Allen Security "guru" for rent or hire - http://www.lightconsulting.com/~travis/ -><- GPG fingerprint: 9D3F 395A DAC5 5CCC 9066 151D 0A6B 4098 0C55 1484 --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]