Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Decryption matrix

This page is an archive of the proposed deletion of the article below. Further comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or on a Votes for Undeletion nomination). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was delete. Eugene van der Pijll 19:28, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

Decryption matrix

There does not appear to be a notable concept by this name, as far as I can gather. The term is used a few times on pages indexed by Google, but they nearly all mean a different thing to what is described here. The only place is [1], but I would suggest their assertion that "a decryption matrix [is] a common device in codebreaking" is an error. There would seem to be no evidence of this concept outside that page, and I've never come across it in the literature. There was a previous VfD to keep, but that was based on the belief that this was a genuine concept, which would appear not to be the case. — Matt Crypto 16:01, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

• Weak delete This is a placeholder vote. I'm going to research the topic when I get home tonight. I'll let you know what I come up with, and expand the article as/if needed -Harmil 16:55, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

I stopped at the local tech bookstore and abused their resources in order to peruse the most authoritative books I could find. I'd already leafed through Applied Cryptography at work, of course, but it doesn't deal with attacks against crypto except from the standpoint of assuring the security of a given algorithm. So, I paged through 4 or 5 of the books that were more of the accademic sort and less of the "teach yourself how to use a crypto library in 10 seconds". I'm crypto-savvy, but no expert, so it's possble that I missed something, but I found no references in the index or ToC to this term. I paged through the sections that looked most promissing in one or two of the texts as well. Unless someone can come up with a sound definition that actually parses well, I'm all for deleting. -Harmil 21:25, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

• Delete. Does not appear to be real. --Carnildo 23:49, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
• Keep and cleanup. The definition is wrong (a matrix of the form described is sometimes used in cryptanalysis but this is not termed the decryption matrix). However this is a real term used in decryption, specifically with respect to the Hill cipher, a family of cryptographic algorithms based on invertible matrices. K. Gopalakrishnan, Associate Professor of Computer Science at East Carolina University, set an exam in which students are required to compute the decryption matrix of a hill cipher [2]. This document is based on an original produced by Ross Moore of McQuarie University and Nikos Drakos of University of Leeds. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 18:02, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
  • Yes, you would normally use the term "decryption matrix" in the context of the Hill cipher, but that's not what this article is discussing at all. You could, I suppose, write a new article from scratch that defines a decryption matrix with respect to the Hill cipher, but it's not a particularly special or separate concept from the Hill cipher itself, and wouldn't ever be much of an article. — Matt Crypto 18:10, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
  • You're right. Changed vote: delete. --Tony Sidaway^Talk 15:17, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
• Delete, the definition is entirely bogus. A new article could be written on the real definition, but this article is flatly wrong - it's like having the banana entry tell you that bananas are a type of mammal. Xaa 03:56, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in an undeletion request). No further edits should be made to this page.