2.12, due on November 25

1. Difficult: I found it difficult how to follow how they exactly got the products of the cycles from just three simple words.

2. Reflective: I remember working with permutations and finding products of cycles in Abstract Algebra but I don't remember how we did it.

19.1-19.2, due on November 20

1. Difficult: I didn't really get the quantum mechanics. I understood it though the light example but did not understand once arrows and things started to be drawn and used as a key.

2. Reflective: Who would think to use quantum mechanics with cryptography? All I've ever heard is how hard quantum mechanics is but I guess that's what makes it effective in cryptography.

14.1-14.2, due on November 18

1. Difficult. I don't really get how the zero-knowledge is working. I understand that its checking multiple data that is hard to come up with if you don't have it but don't really get how it works.

2. Reflective: I'm glad something is working to keep my bank account info safe and from having my card information and pin from being stolen form me.

Exam 2 Questions, due on November 15

1. Which topics and ideas do you think are the most important out of those we have studied? 

• I think the most important topics we studied are the different types of cryptosystems gone over and all the different ways you can attack them. That is the reason we have gone over everything else.

2. What kinds of questions do you expect to see on the exam? 

• I expect to see different calculations that we can actually do by hand such as the topics with modular arithmetic, Jacobi symbols, and Shamir threshold scheme problems.

3. What do you need to work on understanding better before the exam?

• I need to understand all of the factoring methods better and how exactly to do those by hand without sage. I also need to go over discrete logs and the review says simple discrete logs but how simple. Can you just brute force them?

12.1-12.2, due on November 13

1. Difficult: I didn't really follow how you write the polynomial for threshold schemes and then why putting it back together the way the book describes works.

2. Reflective: I could see why these methods would be useful. It's important to have ways to share important information if there needs to be so many people involved in the process.

9.1-9.4, due on November 11

1. Difficult: I found following the steps for the RSA and ElGamal Signature Schemes hard. There are just so many steps that you have to keep straight.

2. Reflective: It makes sense that we went over the birthday attack before this section. It shows why that attack is important to understand when digitally signing documents.

8.4-8.5 and 8.7, due on November 8

1. Difficult: I found it difficult to follow how the birthday attack and the hash function related and why they were useful together.

2. Reflective: I remember talking about the birthday paradox in my stats class. We had about 23 people in it and we went around the room and we found a birthday match. I didn't really understand why the probability is the way it is until reading this section on birthday attacks.

8.1-8.2, due on November 6

1. Difficult: I don't really understand what a hash function is. I get that it's another way to encrypt messages but how it does that was confusing to me.

2. Reflect: I feel like every new way of coding that comes up I'm lost in the reading but eventually I figure it out/understand it. Hopefully after class this topic will be the same.

7.3-7.5, due on November 4

1. Difficult: The hardest part for me was following the computational and Decision Diffie-Hellman Problems and how those benefit you when it come to breaking ElGamal.

2. Reflective: It's interesting that cryptosystems can be built off of things like factoring and discrete logs just because they are so hard to do.