Assignment 21

The first midterm was an interesting combination of the history of cryptography and an introduction to number theory. Though I am still somewhat disappointed that a misreading of the final question on the midterm resulted in a less than stellar grade, the first part of the class was somewhat disconnected. Euler's theorem and the Vigenere cipher, for instance, had almost no overlap and so the questions felt like an assortment of disconnected tidbits. For this midterm, I expect a similar approach to conceptual and application problems, but I also think that the questions will be more encompassing than the first.
The second part of the course so far has been almost exclusively dedicated to covering public key cryptosystems and I would imagine that a variety of questions would all relate directly to RSA systems, hash functions and discrete logarithms even if the questions did not explicitly state them. All of the number theory and theorems covered have basically been background information to allow us to appreciate that factoring large numbers and computing discrete logarithms is hard. Using this mathematical appreciation and basis, I imagine the test would compare public key cryptosystems and perhaps be more theoretical than the first. In any event, I am not prepared for it yet and am somewhat frightenned by the number of possible questions, though they appear to be much smaller than the number of calculations necessary to factor large prime numbers...