How aren’t all cryptography algorithms of the same strength

Question

I have been researching cryptography and this question just came to mind, if someone intercepts a cyphertext and doesn’t know the algorithm used, then for all he knows it could be using the strongest or the weakest algorithms out there

In: 0

Answer 1

While the algorithm could be of any strength, the underlying data isn’t. This means that with weaker algorithms, it will be easier to detect the patterns in the data. As a practical example, during World War 2, the allies needed to decrypt the data that the Nazis were encoding using the Enigma machine. The fact that the Nazis used a standard format for their weather reports, and ended almost all of their messages with “Heil Hilter” made it much easier to decode.