Text 1. Cryptanalysis.

Cryptanalysis is hard work, requiring a willingness to endure many false starts, and a painstaking attention to detail. It requires intelligence to see subtle patterns in incomprehensible ciphertext.

Automated aids to cryptanalysis come in many forms. Some collected statistical information about ciphertexts, thus removing one bit of drudgery from human shoulders. Others, such as the Bombe used in attacking the German Enigma, or the DES cracker built by the Electronic

Frontier Foundation, or the converted unit record equipment (punched card machines) which compared Japanese code messages to one another at various displacements to find messages with overlapping superencipherment groups, work by trying thousands, or millions, of possibilities, one after another.

Neither of these techniques is adequate to deal with many cipher systems, particularly modern ones. A well-designed cipher will not offer a simple opportunity to try different possibilities to find partial information about the key, and will have a key large enough to make trying every possible key hopeless. Nor is ordinary statistical information about the frequencies and contacts of bytes in the ciphertext likely to be much use.

Thus, approaches taken from the field of AI (artificial intelligence) have been tried. In these approaches, it is attempted to combine the speed of the computer with steps that at least slightly move towards the skill and judgement of a human cryptanalyst.