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Re:The Cryptographic Doom Principle by bandrami on Wednesday April 15, 2015 @12:31AM (#9378886)
First, ciphertext is ciphertext. They'd probably be able to determine it's a block cipher and what the block size is, but that's about it.

You can tell mode somewhat reliably (I've hit 75% confidence or so) by the entropy content of the ciphertext, and I've never done a Markov chain longer than a native word so I'd assume that gets better the longer your chain is. I would also assume people much smarter than me have compiled heuristics that are more useful than just determining the mode.

Re:The Cryptographic Doom Principle by frankchn on Wednesday April 15, 2015 @01:10AM (#9378995)
I believe it is considered a significant break in a block cipher if you can distinguish messages encrypted via that cipher against random bits constructed in a similar way (i.e. constructing an adversary such that it has a non-negligible advantage in the PRF security game against the family of functions for the block cipher).