brute force

A cryptanalysis technique or other kind of attack method involving an exhaustive procedure that tries a large number of possible solutions to the problem. (See: impossible, strength, work factor.)

Tutorial: In some cases, brute force involves trying all of the possibilities. For example, for cipher text where the analyst already knows the decryption algorithm, a brute-force technique for finding matching plain text is to decrypt the message with every possible key. In other cases, brute force involves trying a large number of possibilities but substantially fewer than all of them. For example, given a hash function that produces an N-bit hash result, the probability is greater than 1/2 that the analyst will find two inputs that have the same hash result after trying only 2**(N/2) randomly chosen inputs. (See: birthday attack.)