Key-recovery attack

A key-recovery attack is an adversary's attempt to recovery the cryptographic key of an encryption scheme.^[1]^:52 Historically, cryptanalysis of block ciphers has focused on key-recovery, but security against these sorts of attacks is a very weak guarantee since it may not be necessary to recover the key to obtain partial information about the message or decrypt message entirely.^[1]^:52 Modern cryptography uses more robust notions of security. Recently, indistinguishability under adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack (IND-CCA2 security) has become the "golden standard" of security.^[2]^:566 The most obvious key-recovery attack is the exhaustive key-search attack. But modern ciphers often have a key space of size $2^{128}$ or greater, making such attacks infeasible with current technology.

References

^ ^a ^b Goldwasser, S. and Bellare, M. "Lecture Notes on Cryptography". Summer course on cryptography, MIT, 1996-2001
^ Boneh, Dan. Advances in Cryptology -- Crypto 2003 : 23rd Annual International Cryptology Conference, Santa Barbara, California, Usa, August 17-21, 2003, Proceedings. Berlin: Springer, 2003.