Section 2.12; November 24

Today's stuff didn't have very much hard stuff. This was partially because it was more of a story in the section, and also because I have studied the enigma. It is a really interesting machine though, and amazing how effective it was.

What I love the most was how Enigma spured the creation of computers. Without it, who knows how much slower the need for computers might have been. It is also interesting to see how people realized they new how to solve something but needed to be able to test solutions faster than humans could by hand.

Section 19.3; November 23

Difficult? Try everything :) While I think that quantum computing is really cool, it is also really good at confusing me. I really enjoyed the paper that explained Shor's algorithm without any complex math. It helped me when I read section 19.3. Even with that paper though, I am not sure I understand all of the math or exactly how it works.

As for being cool, I think the coolest thing is how quatum computers work. That they can take essentially multiple imputs at once and return multiple return values. It is also an interesting paradaim where you try to control probability curves to get the correct answer.

Section 19.1 - 19.2; November 20

The hardest part to understand is most certainly just the way that quantam mechanics work. Luckily I have studied this in another computer science lesson. It is hard to really wrap your head around the idea that observing data will change data, but that is the basis of quantum cryptography.

The cooles thing is how quantum mechanics work. It does provide us with a potential to transfer keys securely. It does seem strange that we couldn't just use this medium for transfering data itself. Since no one can observe it without changing it, then why don't we just find a way to send messages over this channel. Thus we impede key easedropping on standard communicaiton.

Section14.1-14.2: November 18th

The hardest part, though still not hard, is following the Feige-Fiat-Shamir scheme. Wow, couldn't they have picked a smaller name... It is really just an extension of what we already saw, but expands on it to enhance performance.

The most interesting is probably just the concept of zero-knowledge techniques for proving ability. I think this could have application to identity proving without having to say exactly who a person is and not individual attributes.

Section 12.1-12.2, November 16

At first the secret sharing schemes were a little hard to follow, but after I looked at them a little close it became apparent what was happening. The hardest one to follow was the one described by Blakley. It was harder because it did stuff inside of a plane instead of as a line, which I was more familiar with.

The most interesting part was the note at the end where it mentioned how to combine the strengths of both threshold schemes and simpler schemes to create complex secret sharing methodologies. It is interesting to see how they all combine.

Exam 2 Review, November 13

I think the most important thing we have studied in these sections would be about the math that power the encryption. I think this is so for several reason. The first reason is that it lets us work with algorithms we might not understand, but maybe even more importantly in shows us how to think creatively about the problems presented to us.

Like the first test I am expecting to see problems that mainly deal with the items from section 3 that we have learned. I would also expect to have to explain in a general sense how the other algorithms function.

I need to work on remembering all the different ways to solve the factorization and discrete logs. I also need to review ElGamal.

I really want to go over elliptical curve cryptography and quantum cryptography.

Section 8.3, 9.4 - November 11

The hardest part was how DES worked. I understood the SHA-1 section easily since I have coded it before. DES was new. It wasn't that hard to follow. It reminds me a lot of ElGamal encryption in the way that it works.

The coolest part was DES. It was interesting to see how our pair of information doesn't really gives a lot of information about the document, but provides a way to check it very easily.

Section 9.1-9.4,

The hardest part for me was to see how the ElGamil version of digital signatures worked. It was still pretty straight forward using what we already learned about ElGamil. It was only hardest because it is the only one I haven't done myself yet.

THe coolest part was too read about the birthday attacks on signatures. I had never though of this. It makes sense, and while easy to fool it was cool to look at it.

Section 8.4-8.5, 8.7, November 06

Nothing very hard here either. I am aware of the birthday attack, as I wrote code that did this before. Because of this probably the hardest thing to understand was how to use hash functions as cryptographic functions, but even that is not that hard to do.

The coolest part is how quickly birthday attacks reduce the number of tries needed. It isn't a small reduction either, but reduces the exponent by half which is huge.

Section 8.1-8.2, November 4th

Well Hashing is pretty straight forward. I have personally implemented SHA-1 so I am pretty aware of how everything works. The their is a proof in the section, that while not hard, would be the hardest to follow.

The most interesting thing is how it mentions that the sometimes hash functions are allowed to have viable birthday attacks and still be considered feasible. It makes sense, especially when you realize that even with SHA-1 a birthday attack take 2^80 iterations to find, and what you find isn't even viable as a different message.