this is probably too "low-level" for "applied cryptography", but it's still a real-world problem for me: - I have a datastream (just a couple bytes) that I know is huffman encoded. however, I don't have the tables or know anything else. - I do not only know parts of the plaintext, but can generate it at will. however, I do not know for sure where in the ciphertext it will end up and I know for sure there is other information in the datastream. given this, it shouldn't be too difficult to derive the tables, right? especially not if I can generate ciphertext at will with known plaintext inside. so, aside from staring at long rows of binary and waiting to spot the pattern, is there a well-known approach to this? (I want to remotely query a closed-source server software that uses this system to report to an also closed-source client software. I know which information it transports (at least parts) and I have control of the server so I can have it include arbitrary strings (there's a "comment" field that is freely available to me and gets transmitted).) -- "The net treats censorship as a malfunction and re-routes around it." (John Gilmore)