Further improvements to the Bauer-Millward attack on the Hill cipher
Tom Leap, Tim McDevitt, Kayla Novak, Nicolette Siermine · Cryptologia · 2016
The Bauer-Millward attack on the Hill cipher seeks to recover the individual rows of the decryption matrix instead of the entire matrix. The authors present some improvements to the Bauer-Millward attack that reduce the computational workload by a factor of φ(L), where φ is the Euler totient function, and L is the length of the alphabet. They also present a method of efficiently combining the top rows to recover the decryption matrix. Performance statistics are provided for blocks up to size 5, and example analyses are given for blocks up to size 8. Previous authors have stopped at size 4.