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.

7.2 Due October 29

This section was pretty cool. I thought that the most interesting part was the relationships between solving these types of problems and factoring problems. Like it being harder when p=3 (mod 4). I guess that could be purely coincidence, but it still caught my attention.
The hardest part was 7.2.3. I don't have a very firm grasp of why that method works.

6.4.1 Due October 25

This section was very interesting. I like factoring, and I think it is really cool that we have made so much progress recently in the size of numbers that we are able to factor.
The hard parts for me were understanding how the generating squares that were products of small primes thing worked and understanding why we wanted to put it into a matrix like we did and how that whole dependencies thing worked.

Dr. Dorff Lecture

I thought that the path length/ area minimization problems were pretty interesting to think about. And it was cool that soap bubbles do it all by themselves. In that regard, I thought the lecture was pretty interesting, but he kept things pretty basic, so I didn't see any actual math that was very interesting or difficult to understand. I'm sure that if he would have gone into more details about the actual math that describes these surfaces it would have becoming very challenging though.