How do brute force decryption attacks know when they've found the right solution?

Posted by user151841 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by user151841
Published on 2010-06-16T18:21:49Z Indexed on 2010/06/16 18:32 UTC
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encryption

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brute-force

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cryptanalysis

How do brute-force attacks on encrypted data know when they've found the right key to decrypt the data? Is there a way to know that data's been decrypted, other than having a human looking at it? What if it's not human-friendly data?

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