Reference no: EM132161953

David is a lobbyist and he is secretly visiting different states for a marketing plan. Every midnight, David will send an email to Bob, who is his supervisor, to report the two states that he will visit tomorrow. To protect the information, David will encrypt the message with Bob's public key. For example, if David will visit North Carolina and South Carolina tomorrow, the message he sends to Bob will look like (NC, SC)pub-Bob. (which means the short names of the two states encrypted by the public key of Bob.) A reporter, Alice, is following the secret plan. Alice gets a copy of Bob's public key but she does not know the private key of Bob. One night, Alice uses her laptop to eavesdrop on the message that David sends to Bob. She gets a copy of the encrypted message. Please illustrate how Alice can use forward search to figure out which two states David will visit tomorrow.

Hint: this is an example of forward search attack.