I gained important insights about cryptographic attacks

Discussion
Name
Institution

Discussion
I gained important insights about cryptographic attacks. For instance, I learned that a cryptographic attack is a technique used to circumvent the security of a cryptographic system by identifying a weakness in a code, cryptographic protocol, cipher or key management scheme. As such, in cryptography, the attacker’s goal is to crack the encryption’s secrecy and study the secret message and, better still, the secret key (Boyd & Mathuria, 2013). I also learned about the different types of cryptographic attacks. Brute-force attacks are a good example. These entail attempting each possible character combination to identify the ‘key’ to decipher an encrypted message. Another good example is the cipher-only attack; in this kind of attack, the attacker is knowledgeable of the ciphertext of different messages which have been encrypted utilizing the same encryption algorithm (Tilborg & Jajodia, 2014). Therefore, the challenge of the attacker is to find the ‘key’ which can then be utilized to decrypt all messages. The known-plaintext attack is also in this list. This is where the attacker is aware of some of the ciphertext and plaintext; he can then find the ‘key’ by reverse engineering and he can decode other messages which utilize a similar ‘key’ and algorithm. Other kinds of cryptographic attacks include man-in-the middle attacks, replay attacks, side channel attacks, chosen plaintext attacks, timing attack; the list is endless. There are several countermeasures that can be used to strengthen the cryptosystem and thus make it harder for an attacker to gain access into the system; this is yet an invaluable insight I got from the lesson. Some of the countermeasures that can be applied include utilizing strong passwords, executing strong cryptosystems with disused encipherment and executing long key spaces (Boyd & Mathuria, 2013).

References
Boyd, C., & Mathuria, A. (2013). Protocols for authentication and key establishment. Springer Science & Business Media.
Tilborg, H. C., & Jajodia, S. (2014). Encyclopedia of cryptography and security. Springer Science & Business Media.