ABSTRACT
Brute force is one of the less subtle1 ways of attacking cryptosystems; it simply consists of trying all possible values for the secret to recover, until the correct one is found. Yet, this approach is more tricky than it may seem. To illustrate this point, we start this chapter by a special case of brute force attacks: dictionary attacks. Typically, a dictionary attack is used to find out the password that gives access to a user’s account on an information system. Since passwords are used for a large number of purposes, dictionary attacks can be used in a large variety of contexts.
