16.1 for 30 November

1. The example on page 350 was difficult to understand dealing with adding the points and talking about roots. I was a little unsure about what exactly was going on.

2. I thought the idea of points on an elliptic curve forming an Abelian group with an identity being the point at infinity was an interesting concept.

14.1-2 for 18 November

1. The tunnel example did not make much sense to me. The example of the similar idea with the Feige-Fiat-Shamir Identification scheme at first was a little hard to figure out how step four verified that Peggy knew s_i, but then I reread it and it made more sense.

2. I thought that the idea of a zero knowledge proof was interesting, since it was a way of avoiding the ATM scam mentioned at the beginning of the book.

12.1 12.2 for 16 November

1. I was a little unsure of how the Vandermonde matrix was set up and why it worked exactly.

2. I thought the idea of secret sharing was interesting, that the secret could be split among 7 people but a minimum of 3 people would be needed to uncover it (as an example). The idea of an interpolation polynomial seemed like a creative way to go about it.

13 November

1. RSA is definitely a major topic, and how to attack it if it is not applied well. That would also include primality testing and factorization. Also discrete logs I would expect to have a significant portion.

2. I would expect to see some computational questions that would use techniques discussed in class to factor or find discrete logs, and some ciphers similar to what we have done in class that may have some weakness that can be exploited.

3. I feel like my weakest area is some of the more complicated algorithms such as Pohlig Hellman and the Quadratic Sieve.

4. Anything that would relate to number theory somehow I would find interesting, but there is nothing in particular I can think of.

8.3,9.5 For 11 November

1. There were a lot of steps and details in the SHA-1 algorithm. The difficult steps for me were steps 1 and 3d. I was a the function was a little strange that is used in 3d and then the first step just didn't come clearly to me.

2. I thought it was interesting to see some actual hashes and signing algorithms now that we have talked in detail about what they are and some possible uses and weaknesses.

9.1-9.4 For 9 November

1. The most difficult part was working out the details of how the el-gamal signature scheme works. The elgamal encryption is still a little new so it was good to see it in another setting to get a better idea of how it is secure.

2. I thought that this was an interesting way to get a secure way of verifying that someone sent something. I thought that it was very interesting that the message could be known and the source of the message be known with certainty.

8.1-2 for 4 November

1. The difficult part was understanding the details of the second example and the proposition in 8.1. There were enough details that it didn't come at a first reading.

2. I think the idea of a hash function is interesting because of signatures and error checking. I also liked the idea of being strongly/ collision-free, since even though the function is not injective it is hard to find two elements that map to the same thing.

7.3-7.5 for 2 November

1. Something difficult from this chapter was how to solve the football prediction predicament, but I did think it was a interesting way to solve the problem.

2. The Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange provided a nice way to exchange keys over a public key system. I thought it was interesting because in the previous chapters about AES and DES they said that the key could be exchanged over some public key system, and this method of doing it seems to be efficient and safe.