In
cryptography, a
brute-force attack, or
exhaustive key search, is a
cryptanalytic attack that can, in theory, be used against any encrypted data (except for data encrypted in an
information-theoretically secure manner). Such an attack might be used when it is not possible to take advantage of other weaknesses in an encryption system (if any exist) that would make the task easier. It consists of systematically checking all possible
keys or
passwords until the correct one is found. In the worst case, this would involve traversing the entire
search space.