I know there are already of few questions about this and I'm working with the advices that were given but I still doubt my approach is the fastest, so I'd really appreciate if you helped me find a faster way.
What I want to do: I have 2 encrypted messages (about 200 characters each in HEX) and I want to decrypt them. I know that the same key was used on both of them and that the original message is written in English (should be something about a book), so I attempted to crack it with crib-words (" the ", "the ", "he t" ..., same with " and ", " book " and " novel ") but I was only able to find two words so far ("guess" in one text, "the" in the other) which is kinda sad.
I made a little Java program (just in Eclipse) that's doing the following:
- Get 3 Strings with the same length as input (text A, text B and the crib repeated over and over again)
- Take 2 int, do A XOR B, take the next 2,... repeat until the end of the String is reached
- Do the same thing with the result of A XOR B and the crib (in the same "for")
- Output it as Hex
I'm then using a little applet to convert the Hex to ASCII.
I read that there's a way to get the positions of blanks which would be at least a little big helpful, but I didn't quite get how it works. Is there another method of getting a result faster?