Cryptography and linear algebra
June 25, 2014
Since humans invented the written language, they have tried to share information secretly. This is basically, the objective of Cryptography, the study of the techniques to protect sensitive communications by means of data encryption and its posterior decryption. Encryption is the transformation of data into some unreadable form, so, even those who can see the encrypted data cannot understand the hidden information. Decryption is the reverse of encryption; it is the transformation of encrypted data back into some intelligible form.
Although there are different methods to encrypt and decrypt messages, we'll focus on a linear algebra based cipher, the Hill cipher, which uses a matrix as a cipher to encode a message, and it's extremely difficult to break when a large matrix is used. The receiver of the message decodes it using the inverse of the matrix.
