Re: Just how does it know?

Benjamin L. Peterson (bpeters2@nd.edu)
Thu, 1 May 1997 07:48:35 -0500 (EST)

On Thu, 1 May 1997, Shaun Stuart wrote:
>
>I do have one question about this effort in general - How does the
>program know when the correct key has been found? Presumably, if someone
>were trying keys by hand, they'd look at the output and, if it was
>unreadable, they'd know it wasn't the right key. But how does a program
>decide?

>From http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/97challenge/index.html:
For each contest, the unknown plaintext message is preceded by
three known blocks of text that contain the 24-character phrase
"The unknown message is: ".
If a key encrypts the first 24 characters correctly, I imagine it will be
the right key.

-Ben

--
/**************************************************************************/
/* Benjamin Peterson   Computer Science Senior,  University of Notre Dame */
/* E-mail Benjamin.L.Peterson.35@nd.edu  or  bpeters2@plato.helios.nd.edu */
/**************************************************************************/