An attacker has captured a target file that is encrypted with public key cryptography. Which of the attacks below is likely to be used to crack the target file?

A timing attack exploits variations in execution time to infer secret key information, but does not directly decrypt a captured ciphertext file without access to the decrypting system.

A replay attack involves retransmitting captured authentication or session tokens to impersonate a user, and does not help decrypt an encrypted file.

A memory trade-off (time-memory trade-off) attack is used to crack password hashes by precomputing lookup tables, and is not applicable to asymmetric encrypted file content.

In public key cryptography, the encryption key (public key) is known to everyone, meaning an attacker can freely encrypt chosen plaintexts and observe the resulting ciphertexts. By encrypting candidate plaintexts and comparing them to the captured ciphertext, the attacker can deduce the original plaintext. This is the defining characteristic of a chosen plaintext attack applied to asymmetric encryption.