Encryption

According to searchsecurity.techtarget.com, “Encryption is the conversion of data into a form, called a ciphertext that cannot be easily understood by unauthorized people.” In order to understand the data or the message that is being sent, the receiver must be able to decrypt the message. Decryption thus refers to the process of converting the message from cipher text into its original format or plaintext whereby the reader would be able to understand the message. Encryption is used to ensure the confidentiality of a message that is being sent is not compromised as in case of the message being intercepted, it ensure that only authorized individuals are able to understand the contents. As technology has been advancing, the complex nature of encrypting and decrypting messages have also been advancing. Individuals and experts now create even harder to crack algorithms and formulae for encrypting data. Despite this, there are quite often ways in which a captured message can be decrypted without the use of brute force.
The attack would be one that is based on cipher text only (www.londoninternational.ac.uk). This means that only the cipher text is acquired but has no knowledge of the meaning of the message in plaintext. One can try to critically and statistically analyze the cipher text, in order to try and derive the meaning of the encrypted text or look for combinations of common letters or character strings that would aid in the decrypting and understanding the captured message.
Another such method, as stated as my peers, is to use the fact that symmetric encryption only uses a single secret key when encrypting a message. Thus, before capturing the message, the secret key can be covertly acquired through methods such as befriending an individual who has knowledge of the key or snooping to find the key. Thus once the encrypted message is obtained, the key will already be acquired so as to decipher the message.
Another method of deciphering a captured message is