Section 16.1

Reading about elliptic curves was interesting, interesting to see how even though some of the older ciphers havent been broken necessarily that they have developed more intense ones.  I was wondering what the importance of adding the point (infinity, infinity) would have on the equation, seeing how that is only kind of a solution....
It was also intriguing how it said that when something goes wrong that that is when we get our information.   funny that it takes breaking it down to be able to get what we want.

Section 2.12

This section was really interesting because it let me see some of the real world application and how cryptanalysis has been done.  I dont envy the job of compiling a list of 105k different settings and setting up the codebook especially without a computer.... But I guess as Emperor Palpatine says "do what must be done".  I like permutations and cycles so this part mathematically was pretty easy going.

Section 19.3 and online reading

I was glad that the reading started off saying that we arent going to explain this all as detailed as we might but youre going to have to take a few things on faith.  When it comes to quantum mechanics I am completely ok with that...  The first part made logical sense, but when it started talking about fourier transforms I was a little confused, on what they were finding and then on how to use them.  Are Fourier transforms something that we might analyze more than compute?  I understand about the peaks and the periodicity but getting it to that form is the scarier part.
And the online article made sense too, interesting to see what happens when you distill the math out of a complicated subject.

Sections 19.1 and 19.2

I have never been so scared for this class as I am right now.  I didnt know that we would get to talk about quantum anything... much less apply it to cryptography....
The experiment with the light was interesting, and I understood the idea of the experiment but once we started to find orthogonal bases I started to get a little confused.
The second part that was talking about the usage was actually a little more understandable.  It is very cool that with this kind of cryptography that you can detect eavesdropping, although it seems like it would take there being a large amount of data being sent to do so.  But maybe thats possible here.  It was interesting to say the least.

Test 2 Prep

The things that we spent the most time covering and applying I feel like are the RSA and ElGamal systems, we talked not only about the systems themselves but how to use them and sign them and do other things with them.  I think that we will see them come up on the exam in probably multiple formats.
I expect that we will have to use the definitions that we are supposed to know to do the types of problems that are on the other side of the sheet.  It seems like we will be combining the knowing part with the thinking through and application of the concepts.  Probably a gnarly problem finding square roots and then having to use the Chinese Remainder Theorem... I hate the Chinese Remainder Theorem.

Section 12.1-12.2

So the first section about the idea of secret splitting was pretty straight forward.  You want to split up a message between several people.  Well you could just give them each a piece and make them put it together.
The next section is a little bit trickier to understand.  When all of those people get together do they have to try all of the different combinations of pairs that they have?  Even given that the t people will group up and talk together that seems like it would take some doing to recover the message.
Also does having more than t people help your chances?  If you have more people does it make it any easier to recover the message?
The Lagrange method seems easier than the linear method as well.  And by easier I mean at least more intuitive.

Sections 8.4-8.5, 8.7

It was interesting to read about the birthday attack idea from a cryptological standpoint.  I have talked about it a lot in my actuarial classes and done problems with it before but this did a better job explaining the reasoning behind its paradoxical conclusions than I had heard before.  Interesting to see how the idea relates to choosing keys or codes or even messages.
If the baby step giant step method is superior to the birthday method, is there any reason to ever use the birthday method in real life?
I see how the birthday attack idea relates to multicollisions but I am still shaky on how to find said collisions.  Section 8.7 seems to be a lot of the material that we have read before and especially that we talked about in class on Wed, so i feel pretty comfortable with it.

Sections 8.1-8.2

So this whole reading was a little bit hard for me.  I understand the idea of what a hash function should do, that it should make data more compact, which I can see the benefit of that.  However designing one seems very complex to me.  Im not even entirely sure when it says that we are only looking for some m' with h(m') = y.  So we aren't looking for m? Just what y is?
Somewhere along the lines of computing the inverses of one way functions kind of messed me up...
Even just XORing the vectors and making an array in the "simple" example was enough to scare me off.  I guess I'm not a real cryptographer yet.

Section 7.3-7.5

Bit commitment seems like an understandable idea, it makes sense that you would want both parties to be able to be satisfied.  It seems like what we were supposed to learn in that section was another thing that must be kept in mind in designing a cryptosystem.
What is the usage rate of the cryptosystems that we have been talking about?   Does ElGamal get as much play time as others like RSA or AES?
The ElGamal system seems like it is at least as much work as RSA, and I am still confused about computing the decryption.  Is a the same as alpha? or where did that come from?