Publication

On the Incomparability of Entropy and Marginal Guesswork in Brute-Force Attacks

2000
Conference Papers

Abstract

We discuss measures of statistical uncertainty relevant to determining random values in cryptology. It is shown that unbalanced and self-similar Huffman trees have extremal properties with respect to these measures. Their corresponding probability distributions exhibit an unbounded gap between (Shannon) entropy and the logarithm of the minimum search space size necessary to be guaranteed a certain chance of success (called marginal guesswork). Thus, there can be no general inequality between them. We discuss the implications of this result in terms of the security of weak secrets against brute-force searching attacks, and also in terms of Shannon's uncertainty axioms.

Official source

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/entities/publication/4da1ad7e-9308-450c-b345-2c94d75377ea

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2000
Conference Papers

Abstract

Official source

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/entities/publication/4da1ad7e-9308-450c-b345-2c94d75377ea

About this result

Related concepts (32)

Brute-force attack

In cryptography, a brute-force attack consists of an attacker submitting many passwords or passphrases with the hope of eventually guessing correctly. The attacker systematically checks all possible passwords and passphrases until the correct one is found. Alternatively, the attacker can attempt to guess the key which is typically created from the password using a key derivation function. This is known as an exhaustive key search.

Brute-force search

In computer science, brute-force search or exhaustive search, also known as generate and test, is a very general problem-solving technique and algorithmic paradigm that consists of systematically checking all possible candidates for whether or not each candidate satisfies the problem's statement. A brute-force algorithm that finds the divisors of a natural number n would enumerate all integers from 1 to n, and check whether each of them divides n without remainder.

Preimage attack

In cryptography, a preimage attack on cryptographic hash functions tries to find a message that has a specific hash value. A cryptographic hash function should resist attacks on its (set of possible inputs). In the context of attack, there are two types of preimage resistance: preimage resistance: for essentially all pre-specified outputs, it is computationally infeasible to find any input that hashes to that output; i.e., given , it is difficult to find an such that () = .

Related publications (5)

On the Incomparability of Entropy and Marginal Guesswork in Brute-Force Attacks

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