# One-Time-Pad with key-reuse: Faster way of decrypting?

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?

-
First thing is that you should computer $X := A\oplus B$ once and store that - don't do it each time you change the crib! Personally, the first thing I'd check for would be $X \oplus "\ \ \ \ \ \ \ "$ –  figlesquidge Jan 14 '14 at 23:25
If you have "guess", you should also have " guess " (e.g., with the spaces around the word. That should also give you seven letters in the other ciphertext, which ideally doesn't fall perfectly on word boundaries; if it doesn't, you can try and guess at the remaining characters of the partial word revealed. –  Stephen Touset Jan 14 '14 at 23:54
@figlesquidge There's not noticable delay in computing the programm and since I have to get X ^ crib anyway and I only use it for myself, I don't mind. ;) And thanks, I just tried that (didn't even think about it) and at least I now know where the spaces in one of the texts are (this is what it means, right?). –  Neph Jan 15 '14 at 0:05
That's not even close to nothing. "m" is highly likely to be followed by a lowercase vowel. That's only five plausible candidates On the other hand, a word ending in "g" is likely to really end in "ing", or one of only a few other digraphs. –  Stephen Touset Jan 15 '14 at 1:12
As pointed by figlesquidge, $X := A\oplus B$ is very useful; further, you demonstrably get no other clue from the ciphertext if the keystream is random. Also: in ASCII, space is 0x20, and uppercase letters are [0x41-0x5A]. It follows that if the plaintext only uses this, and this is a straight OTP using XOR, then a byte of $X$ has bit 5 (corresponding to 0x20 mask) set only if exactly one of the two plaintext character is a space. When (and only when) both plaintext characters are identical (including but not limited to space), $X$ is 0 (thus has bit 5 clear). –  fgrieu Jan 15 '14 at 11:37