Why XOR Alone Is Not Secure
Learn key-reuse attacks and crib-dragging against weak XOR encryption.
Welcome
In this lesson we go beyond theory and demonstrate concrete attacks against XOR encryption: key reuse, known-plaintext, and crib-dragging.
Weak Key Reuse Scenario
Imagine a web app encrypting session tokens with the same XOR key. Attacker captures two encrypted tokens. XORing them cancels the key: C1^C2 = P1^P2.
All lessons in this course
- Bitwise Operations Refresher
- XOR Encryption & the One-Time Pad
- Why XOR Alone Is Not Secure
- XOR Inside AES & Stream Ciphers