There were interesting and confusing parts of these sections. The first thing that struck me was that much of the DES breaking (and code breaking in general) is dependent upon memory. "This is possible with a lot of memory" seems to be a common phrase in this book. In this decade we have nearly limitless amounts of memory available (that's my own thought; I could be wrong) which will require the algorithms needed for crytosystems to be much more difficult. I was also interested in the password security section. I assumed passwords were more effective if they were >8 characters long and included symbols because they were harder to guess. Section 4.8 made me think that those types of passwords are harder to guess, but also they are easier to encrypt and harder for Eve to decrypt.
The modes of operation were very difficult to follow. I understand that they are variations of the DES, and Monday's lecture helped me understand the big picture of what was going on but I definitely got lost in the specifics of the different modes. I don't know why they are different or what it would look like to execute them all. I think the keys are still just strings of 1s and 0s.
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