I'm reading Understanding Cryptography by Christof Paar and Jan Pelzl. In chapter 2 (Stream Ciphers) there's a question that goes like this:
Assume we have a stream cipher whose period is quite short. We happen to
know that the period is 150â200 bit in length. We assume that we do not know
anything else about the internals of the stream cipher. In particular, we should not
assume that it is a simple LFSR. For simplicity, assume that English text in ASCII
format is being encrypted.
Describe in detail how such a cipher can be attacked. Specify exactly what Oscar
has to know in terms of plaintext/ciphertext, and how he can decrypt all ciphertext.
I'm assuming that a Known-Plaintext attack would work for this particular scenario. So, the attacker would have to know some plaintext. My question is could the plain-text be derived by performing LFA (Letter Frequency Analysis)? Since the question assume that English text in ASCII format is being encrypted ? If not how can the attacker guess some of the plaintext ?
Or if Known-Plaintext is an infeasible attack what other attack could be feasible ?