Talk:Merkle-Hellman

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WikiProject on Cryptography This article is part of WikiProject Cryptography, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to cryptography on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can choose to edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

[edit] Request for clarification

I don't get the decryption. someone needs to clarify it. Also, I want info on how the cypher was broken. --anon

I fixed a minor error in the key generation section and added some to the previously incredibly vague section on decryption. I hope this makes a little more sense. There is still a lot left unexplained (modular arithmatic, how the cryptosystem was broken, etc), but at least it's a start. I know very little about the topic, but it's really interesting. Anyone who knows more should totally add there insight, I'dbe interested in learning more. -- User:ApatheticToTheCause.

[edit] all cipher system are breackable accept one time pad

all cipher system are breackable accept one time pad

Not necessarily true. Although, given enough time, one can certainly exhaust the keyspace for any cipher (although sometimes it's a nearly impossibly long amount of time) and thus crack the encryption, this doesn't constitute breaking the cipher's encryption. In cryptography we're basically finding a way to transform one piece of data (plaintext) into another (ciphertext) in such a way that the reverse transformation is very efficient, if you know some secret (like a key), and very inefficient if you don't know the secret. BREAKING a cryptosystem requires that you find a way to efficiently decrypt the data without finding out the key. --Duplico 22:37, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] gcd

what is gcd? i looked around and the best match i could find was greatest common divisor. Is this correct? I'm not totally sure how to add to wikipedia in the proper format so i put it in talk. if so, could "gcd(r,q) == 1" be better expressed as "r and q are coprime", since coprime has already been mentioned.