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Brute Forceby Stephen Pellicer
Brute force is a blanket term for using raw power to acquire secret information. It gets its barbaric name from its inelegant approach of simply guessing every possible secret until it guesses the secret it deems a match. It is often employed to guess passwords, defeat one-way hash functions, or even guess the key used to decrypt encrypted data. The effectiveness of brute force depends on three variables: how large the problem space or key space is; how quickly the brute force mechanism can attempt a guess; and the mechanism's ability to verify a correct guess. The primitiveness of brute force attacks is its strength and its weakness. As a weakness, this method must be able to rapidly execute an attempted login, calculate a one-way hash function, or decrypt data using the target encryption algorithm. As a strength, brute force is almost always successful given enough time. Our goal is to make the amount of time for a successful attack uneconomical for the attacker. More... »
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