16.1 Due November 29

This section was kind of complicated. I'm pretty sure that I understand how addition works or at least the principle of it, but that could definitely use some more clarification.

I am interested to find out what this is used for, but we are not quite there yet.

12.1-2 due November 15

These sections were both cool. Secret splitting and threshold methods weren't really anything that I had really thought through before, and it was fun to think about them. I thought that the threshold technique of interpolating a polynomial was really clever.
I don't think that any of it was too hard to understand. I have seen Lagrange polynomials in previous classes, so that part wasn't too bad even though it was probably the most complicated of the methods discussed.

Test Questions

I think that RSA is probably the most important thing that we've learned about in these sections. It seems like we spent the most time on that, and it was the only cryptosystem that we discussed that is actually commonly used.
I expect the questions on the test to be pretty similar to what we have seen on the homework assignments. Just the ones that can be done without the computer though.
I think that I need to work on pretty much everything. I understand how most of the systems work (other than ElGamal) but the attacks and stuff are still pretty hazy as the the theorems that the attacks are based upon.
The quantum stuff sounds like it could be pretty interesting, but I'm up for pretty much anything.

8.3 and 9.5 due 10 November 2010

These sections were interesting. The part that I liked the most was 9.5 even though it was pretty similar to the other signing procedures.
The hardest part was 8.3. It wasn't conceptually difficult, but there were a lot of steps that would be difficult to commit to memory.

9.1-9.4 due November 8

This reading was interesting. Especially the part about birthday attacks, even though these seemed like they would take a really long time to use successfully and like they would be very easily overcome.
The only part that I didn't understand was how multiple signatures could be used for the same document in the El Gamal Scheme.

8.1-8.2 due November 3

These sections were interesting. I have taken a few computer science classes in my college career, so I was familiar with the term hash function, but I didn't really know what they were, how they worked, or what they were for. So, it was cool to learn about those things a little more in-depth.
The hardest part was the last example in 8.1 and there proof of why it was strongly collision-free. I got that they were saying that if you found a collision, you could solve a discrete log problem so they were assuming that it was computationally infeasible, but I guess that I didn't feel very satisfied with that reasoning.

7.3-7.5 Due November 1

These sections were all very interesting. The problem presented in section 7.3 was cool to think about, and it was neat to see the solutions that we have come up with.
The hardest part for me was the last two propositions in section 7.5. I guess that I didn't fully understand the connection between Diffie-Hellman and ElGamal.