In cryptography, a brute-force attack, or exhaustive key search, is a strategy that can, in theory, be used against any encrypted data.
Brute force is a naive algorithm which works through every possible answer until the correct one is found. Some problems can be reasonably solved this way.
Others, for instance obtaining the prime factors of large numbers or picking the best chess move, have a problem space far too large to be solved naively in a reasonable amount of time and effort.
A common example of brute force is password enumeration, where a large number of passwords are used against a protected resource in the hope that one is correct.
Many algorithms are born from trying to reduce the possible solutions in a problem space in an attempt to make brute force more efficient and economical.
These algorithms are generally based on heuristics generated from known patterns in the problem space.
