Talk:Cipher

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The last paragraph:

Most modern ciphers fall into three main categories: ... (followed by a list of four categories)

needs work.

I do not know for sure but suspect that: block vs stream and symmetric key vs asymmetric key are orthogonal categorizations. If that is the case, changing three to four (in the offending paragraph) does not really fix the problem.

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Yep, they're orthogonal. I tidied up the last paragraph to reflect that. The rest of the article should probably be re-worked a bit for clarity as well.

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Encryption and Cipher are currently too similar. They should be merged, or Cipher should be specialized to the customary (though vague) subset of private-key encryption.

[edit] Disambiguation

While I'm a crypto-head and so probably biased, I do think there's a case for primary disambiguation here. I think any user typing in "cipher" is most likely to be looking for the encryption algorithm meaning, as opposed to a synonym for zero, or a Pokemon team of villains, or any of the other meanings. — Matt Crypto 11:33, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merge with Encipherment

Encipherment does not contain enough information to stand on its own. It should be merged into this article.

Neelix (talk) 01:07, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Huh? It's a redirect to this page. --84.250.188.136 (talk) 03:24, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

It wasn't when Neelix wrote the above. — Matt Crypto 05:22, 9 May 2008 (UTC)