CAPEC-20

Standard Abstraction Level
Meta — Very abstract, high-level category
Standard — Specific enough to understand
Detailed — Tied to specific technique Draft MITRE CAPEC Status
Stable — Fully reviewed and complete
Draft — Under development
Incomplete — Partially defined
Deprecated — No longer recommended
Obsolete — Replaced by another CAPEC Likelihood: Low Severity: Low
Encryption Brute Forcing

Description

An attacker, armed with the cipher text and the encryption algorithm used, performs an exhaustive (brute force) search on the key space to determine the key that decrypts the cipher text to obtain the plaintext.

Prerequisites

Ciphertext is known.

Encryption algorithm and key size are known.

Mitigations

Use commonly accepted algorithms and recommended key sizes. The key size used will depend on how important it is to keep the data confidential and for how long.

In theory a brute force attack performing an exhaustive key space search will always succeed, so the goal is to have computational security. Moore's law needs to be taken into account that suggests that computing resources double every eighteen months.

Skills Required

[Low] Brute forcing encryption does not require much skill.