[eperdew]

> To attack classic OTP, you’d brute force the keyspace. Since we’re XORing, whatever we encode the key as, it’s fundamentally being used in binary to XOR between plaintext and ciphertext. So your key is a binary blob the same length as the ciphertext. You keep trying and looking for what seems to be viable plaintext. You never get “all English strings of the given length”, because you’re not brute forcing the output, you’re brute forcing the key, which isn’t necessarily English.

If your key for OTP is uniform random bits without any additional encoding, and of the same length as the plaintext, then won't you enumerate all possible messages of the given length? E.g., "abcdef" and "123456" are indistinguishable when encrypted without knowing the key because there exist keys that map each string to the same ciphertext.