Unicity distance
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Unicity distance is a term used in cryptography referring to the length of an original ciphertext needed to break the cipher by reducing the number of possible spurious keys to zero in a brute force attack. That is, after trying every possible key, there should be just one decipherment that makes sense.
Consider an attack on the ciphertext string "WNAIW" encrypted using a Vigenere cipher with a five letter key. Conceivably, this string could be deciphered into any other string — RIVER and WATER are both possibilities for certain keys. This is a general rule of cryptanalysis: with no additional information it is impossible, even in theory, to decode this message.
Of course, even in this case, only a certain number of five letter keys will result in English words. Trying all possible keys we will not only get RIVER and WATER, but SXOOS and KHDOP as well. The number of "working" keys will likely be very much smaller than the set of all possible keys. The problem is knowing which of these "working" keys is the right one; the rest are spurious.
In general, given any particular assumptions about the size of the key and the number of possible messages, there is an average ciphertext length where there is only one key (on average) that will generate a readable message. In the example above we see only upper case Roman characters, so if we assume this is the input then there are 26 possible letters for each position in the string. Likewise if we assume five-character upper case keys, there are K=265 possible keys, of which the majority will not "work".
A tremendous number of possible messages, N, can be generated using even this limited set of characters: N = 26L, where L is the length of the message. However only a smaller set of them is readable plaintext due to the rules of the language, perhaps M of them, where M is likely to be very much smaller than N. Moreover M has a one-to-one relationship with the number of keys that work, so given K possible keys, only K × (M/N) of them will "work". One of these is the correct key, the rest are spurious.
Since N is dependent on the length of the message L, whereas M is dependent on the number of keys, K, there is some L where the number of spurious keys is zero. This L is the unicity distance.
External links
- Bruce Schneier: How to Recognize Plaintext (http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-9812.html#plaintext) (Crypto-Gram Newsletter December 15, 1998)