Chosen-plaintext attack
A chosen-plaintext attack (CPA) is an attack model for cryptanalysis which presumes that the attacker can obtain the ciphertexts for arbitrary plaintexts. The goal of the attack is to gain information that reduces the security of the encryption scheme.
In a chosen-plaintext attack the adversary can adaptively ask for the ciphertexts of arbitrary plaintext messages. This is formalized by allowing the adversary to interact with an encryption oracle, viewed as a black box. The attacker’s goal is to reveal all or part of the secret encryption key.
The circumstances by which an attacker may obtain ciphertexts for given plaintexts are rare. However, modern cryptography is implemented in software or hardware and is used for a diverse range of applications; for many cases, a chosen-plaintext attack is often very feasible. Chosen-plaintext attacks become extremely important in the context of public key cryptography, where the encryption key is public and so attackers can encrypt any plaintext they choose.
There are two forms of chosen-plaintext attacks:
A general chosen-plaintext attack is carried out as follows:
In the modern world, a cipher is considered secure against a chosen-plaintext attack if, allowed to choose two arbitrary plaintexts (p0, p1), an adversary who has been told to pick the ciphertext for p0 cannot do so with probability greater than 0.5 (50%) which is known as Ciphertext Indistinguishability.
In World War II US Navy cryptanalysts discovered that Japan was planning to attack a location referred to as "AF". They believed that "AF" might be Midway Island, because other locations in the Hawaiian Islands had codewords that began with "A". To prove their hypothesis that "AF" corresponded to "Midway Island" they asked the US forces at Midway to send a plaintext message about low supplies. The Japanese intercepted the message and immediately reported to their superiors that "AF" was low on water, confirming the Navy's hypothesis and allowing them to position their force to win the battle.
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