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SY0-301 · Question #303

Which of the following would provide the STRONGEST encryption?

The correct answer is A. Random one-time pad. A one-time pad (OTP) is the only encryption scheme proven to be information-theoretically (perfectly) secure, provided the key is truly random, at least as long as the plaintext, and never reused. An attacker with unlimited computing power still cannot break it because every…

General security concepts

Question

Which of the following would provide the STRONGEST encryption?

Options

  • ARandom one-time pad
  • BDES with a 56-bit key
  • CAES with a 256-bit key
  • DRSA with a 1024-bit key

How the community answered

(37 responses)
  • A
    92% (34)
  • B
    3% (1)
  • D
    5% (2)

Explanation

A one-time pad (OTP) is the only encryption scheme proven to be information-theoretically (perfectly) secure, provided the key is truly random, at least as long as the plaintext, and never reused. An attacker with unlimited computing power still cannot break it because every possible plaintext is equally likely. DES with a 56-bit key (B) is considered broken and easily brute-forced. AES-256 (C) is computationally strong and the current standard, but it is not mathematically perfect - it is computationally secure. RSA-1024 (D) is considered weak by modern standards and vulnerable to factoring attacks. Therefore, the OTP is theoretically the strongest, even though it is impractical for most real-world use cases.

Topics

#one-time pad#encryption strength#symmetric encryption#key length

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