Dictionary attack

Rarity: Uncommon

A topic a little better known than average, read and translated beyond its own country.

Rarity follows how well known the article is: its views on the French and English Wikipedia over a year, and the number of languages it exists in.

At a glance

Class

Notion

Domain

Science and technology

In collections

Nobody has pulled it yet.

What Wikipedia says

In cryptanalysis and computer security, a dictionary attack is an attack using a restricted subset of a keyspace to defeat a cipher or authentication mechanism by trying to determine its decryption key or passphrase, sometimes trying thousands or millions of likely possibilities often obtained from lists of past security breaches.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article “Dictionary attack”, under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Read the article on Wikipedia

Image: OpenWall, GPL, via Wikimedia Commons.