Which one of the following statements best describes crypto analysis?

Creating codes to obscure plaintext describes cryptography, not cryptanalysis, which is the breaking rather than the building of ciphers.

Obtaining a 'fingerprint' of encrypted data describes hashing or digital fingerprinting, not the goal of cryptanalysis, which targets the recovery of meaning.

Designing one-way encryption algorithms is a function of cryptographic engineering, not cryptanalysis, which attacks existing algorithms rather than creating new ones.

Cryptanalysis is specifically defined as the study and practice of analyzing and breaking cryptographic systems to recover plaintext meaning from ciphertext or to discover secret keys. It is the offensive counterpart to cryptography, involving techniques such as frequency analysis, differential analysis, and algebraic attacks to defeat encryption without possessing the key.