Sections 7.3-7.5, Due November 1

Difficult: I found the discussion of the security of ElGamal Ciphertexts to be a bit confusing. It might be from the strange way it is presented, with theoretical machines doing things that the sections just said cannot be done. Also, there are a couple of methods given to find discrete logs under certain conditions, and the chapter discusses that it is difficult to find discrete logs in general, but it doesn't really talk about how difficult. I suppose this sounds silly, but I was wondering. We talked about with the RSA algorithm how adding a couple of digits to your primes increased computation time exponentially to factor n, how does computation increase with discrete logs when adding digits?

Reflective: I wish the author had decided to include Alice's method for predicting the outcome of football games. That would come in handy I think. The way of sending the prediction so that Bob could tell she didn't alter the message and Alice could keep the message secret until she wanted to reveal it was interesting though. It seems similar to the idea of the countries wanting to share information with each being able to read the message, but not being able to alter the message that we discussed with RSA.