Sections 6.5-6.7 and 7.1, Due October 27

Difficult: The more "mathematical" definition for public key cryptosystems is more difficult to understand than the intuitive description. Of course this is usually the case, and describing how RSA fits helped alot. Other than having to think over the definition a bit, these sections did not have much to be difficult in them. Except understanding what a squeamish ossifrage is.

Reflective: I love the sections that talk about the history of cryptography the most. The RSA challenge seems to wrap up what we have talked about well, and I liked seeing the application of the method from 6.4.1. When I read 6.4.1, I thought that the method should not take too long, but this story shows that indeed it can. I found it funny that after all that work, they only had to try 4 numbers to get the factorization! Discrete Logarithms seems to be a promising chapter too. I had not heard about these before, but they seem like they should be accessible. I suppose in this method, the message will be the exponent, alpha will be the public key, and the discrete log base alpha will be the secret decryption function.