Talk:Distinguishing attack

This article was specifically requested on the "Recent changes" page, so deleting it counters the very idea of putting it up in the first place. The article needs more development, of course. Mindraker 01:48, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

:Yes I agree, this concept is mentioned often in cryptography and also in many of the cryptography articles here on Wikipedia so this article is needed.

:--David Göthberg (talk) 04:56, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

:: I've never heard of this term. Shouldn't this article be deleted or merged with pseudorandom ensemble, pseudorandom or computational indistinguishability or something? RobertHannah89 (talk) 11:25, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

This article currently (february 2008) needs to be reworked and clarified but I am just a "crypto systems and protocol guy" and not a cryptanalyst so I am not a 100% sure that I know what a distinguishing attack is.

But in case I have understood correctly, here are some stuff that I then think this article perhaps should mention:

1. If you can study/analyse the output of a cipher and see that it is not completely random (has some bias of any kind) then you have done a distinguishing attack. That is, if you can tell the output apart from random white noise. One example is that if double occurrence of symbols (like "AA" or "tt") comes more often or less often in the ciphertext than it should in random data then you can distinguish the ciphertext from random data.

1. A more advanced distinguishing attack is if you can look at the output of the cipher and tell which cipher was used. For instance, a certain frequency of double symbols means that it is likely that the cipher RC4 was used.

Thus, a distinguishing attack doesn't really break the cipher. But finding any regularities is usually a bad sign which might indicate weaknesses in the cipher. And finding out which cipher was used is even worse since then one can use knowledge of that specific cipher to do other attacks.

Thus, if a distinguisher (a bias) is found for a cipher it is usually considered a bad cipher and thus considered "broken".

--David Göthberg (talk) 04:56, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

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