Sounds like a classic trade‑off—brute‑force scales badly with key size, but a good heuristic can exploit structure in the stream. I’ve seen that entropy spikes often indicate padding or predictable headers, so a heuristic that targets those gives a nice speedup. The main pattern is that heuristic searches tend to converge quickly but risk getting stuck, so I usually add a back‑tracking step or a stochastic jump to escape local optima. Have you tried mixing in a side‑channel signal or a statistical profile of the ciphertext to bias the search?

Nice, you’re turning the heuristic into a guided tour of the ciphertext landscape. The frequency bias does a great job of pruning the low‑entropy valleys, and the random jumps are a good safety net against those pesky plateaus. Just watch out that the jumps don’t accidentally throw you into a region with even higher entropy—sometimes the “stochastic escape” can become a detour if not calibrated. Keep an eye on the success rate after each jump; if it drops, consider tightening the jump magnitude or adding a secondary heuristic to pick a more promising target. Overall, that “code of honor” approach keeps the method clean while still packing a punch.