Talk:Matrix encryption

Should this page be removed?

I think this page has no value and should therefore be deleted. The so-called matrix encryption described here is very similar to the Hill cipher. The only difference is that the Hill cipher uses modular arithmetic while this thing here does not. Both ciphers are very weak. They can trivially be broken using with a known plaintext attack. The Hill cipher is only notable, because it is a classical cipher and thus may have some historical interest. 62.203.245.208 18:36, 3 December 2006 (UTC)\

Also, it doesn't seem like that cipher is correct... 0 multiplied by anything should equal 0 even in a matrix. I think. (ReshenKusaga 19:33, 12 February 2007 (UTC))

The point of this isn't to give the best encryption method, only to describe what matrix encryption is. Dictionaries don't completely omit what an airplane is now that jets are faster. Also, that is not how matrix multiplicaiton works. BUT this encryption is still wrong because they forgot to change the E in MESSAGE to a number. They skipped right from M to S.

The point is that this article is uneccessary, badly written and incorrect. The article about the Hill cipher already describes an encryption scheme using matrices, contains a better description and gives proper credit. The section "security" is completely wrong. It is not necessary to know the secret key to decrypt a message, since the scheme is insecure. Therefore it would be appropriate to just remove this page and redirect "matrix encryption" to "Hill cipher". 85.2.14.109 10:52, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Done

It did look fishy at first glance.

Hmm, forgot to sign, wondered why MediaWiki didn't say anything. Jafet 17:33, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Keep it!

It's not unnecessary. As stated, dictionaries still describe what an airplane is. It's not easily cracked, especially if you use a larger matrix. Like, how about 10 by 10? Every symbol would be dependant of the 100 surrounding symbols, it's place among those 100, AND the key. Good luck cracking it. 0x0 in a matrix is 0. If you know anything about matrix multiplication however, you realize that it's added to the result of the multiplications in either a horizontal or a vertical line. This is much easier to understand than the Hill Cipher. Also the 'E' was added in AFTER the articles original completion, by overzelous 'helping hands' that don't know jack about the subject.

21:46, 18 December 2006 is a good version: Check that out and then say what you think.

Your analogy with the airplaine is flawed, because better algorithms than this so-called matrix encryption are known for a long time. A better analogy would be someone reinventing a bicycle and replacing the wheels with hexagons. Such a thing would indeed be unnecessary. Your estimate of the schemes security is false too. If you choose a 10 by 10 matrix as a key then every ciphertext symbol would be dependant on 10 plaintext symbols and not 100 as you claim. And again: a known plaintext attack breaks this cipher. All you need to know is part of the plaintext and then you can compute the key simply by solving a system of linear equations. Known plaintext is not hard to get. Try encrypting an e-mail. Much of its header is predictable. Word documents have predictable parts. Even plain old standard letters have highly predictable parts, such as the addresses of the sender and receiver, greetings etc. As you can see breaking this cipher does not need luck. It just needs some knowledge. The biggest problem with this page is that it is misleading readers. It is unacceptable when a wikipedia page claims that a cipher is hard to break when in fact it is not. I dont' want that people are using this cipher believing it gives them security, because wikipedia says so. Therefore I'm going to revert this page. 85.2.45.157 07:07, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Then how about simply stating that the cipher is vulnerable? The Hill Cipher is better, sure. But it's still vulnerable to a plaintext attack (Which it kindly states in the article). The article is better overall, too. However, I believe that the old one should be saved, perhaps fused or edited into the Hill Cipher text, or given a name that makes it less likely to show up on a "Go" search so that people arrive at Hill Cipher but can be linked to the older Matrix Encryption without looking through the history of a redirect page.