Cryptanalysis examines cryptographic systems to find weaknesses that could allow attackers to uncover plaintext or break encryption. Cryptanalysis helps identify and address vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them, making it critical to designing and evaluating cryptographic systems.
Cryptographers use differential cryptanalysis to analyze and break cryptographic systems, particularly symmetric key block ciphers. Differential cryptanalysis compares differences between the input and output of a cipher for many pairs of plaintexts and ciphertexts. Cryptographers apply statistical analysis to identify the key used in the encryption, applying the principle that slight differences in the input can lead to significant differences in the output, which hackers can exploit to recover the key.
