New states of Germany Germany thus consists of 16 states with equal legal statuses. Yet the process of the "inner reunification" between the former East and West Germany is still ongoing. Persisting differences in culture and mentality among the old East Germany and old West Germany are often referred to as the "wall in the head" ("Mauer im Kopf"). "Ossis" ("Easties") are stereotyped as racist, poor and largely influenced by Russian culture. "Wessis" ("Westies") are usually considered snobbish, dishonest, wealthy, and selfish. The terms can be considered disparaging. In 2009, twenty years after the fall of the wall, a poll found that 22% of
Meet-in-the-middle attack Meet-in-the-middle attack The meet-in-the-middle attack (MITM) is a generic space–time tradeoff cryptographic attack against encryption schemes which rely on performing multiple encryption operations in sequence. The MITM attack is the primary reason why Double DES is not used and why a Triple DES key (168-bit) can be bruteforced by an attacker with 2 space and 2 operations. When trying to improve the security of a block cipher, a tempting idea is to encrypt the data several times using multiple keys. One might think this doubles or even "n"-tuples the security of the multiple-encryption scheme, depending on the number of times