This reading was a little more difficult than past readings. Maybe it's because it's been awhile since I've taken linear algebra, but block ciphers just did not make sense to me. Maybe it's because I didn't quite get how matrix inverses mod n work, but I think I'm getting there. I can tell it has to do with finding the adjugate matrix, which I may have to review in order to figure this out. But this looks interesting.
I liked learning about the Sherlock Holmes cipher, and the errors the author made in the dancing-man ciphertext. I think that's a good warning to us, to be sure not to take our codes too lightly. It can be easy to get too confident and mess things up. Also, it reminded me of the code we had to break for homework, where in breaking one of the letters we found that the frequency of e in that string was actually lower than usual. Things are not always what they seem in cryptography; that's what makes it such an interesting field of study.
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