MATB24H3 Lecture Notes - Hill Cipher, Plaintext, Linear Algebra
Document Summary
This lecture will demonstrate a method of encoding and decoding mes- sages. Most of what was studied in this course so far will be used. This is the study of elds of the form zp where p is a prime, matrices, gaus- sian elimination of matrices with entries from zp, linear independence, linear transformations and change of basis matrices. The study of encoding and decoding secret messages is called cryptog- raphy. Uncoded messages are called plaintext and coded messages are ciphertext. The process of writing a plaintext into a ciphertext is called enciphering. The process of converting a ciphertext into plaintext is called deciphering. The process that we are going to study is called hill cipher after lester s. hill who introduced it. We will start by assigning the following numbers to the letters, period, comma and space as follows: Note that we have used the numbers from 0 to 28.
