I will admit Dr. Jenkins, I am pretty nervous for this second exam. To try and alleviate that stress I'm doing my best to be well prepared and studying early. As I have been studying the topics I feel the least sure about are:
- The Pollard Rho Factorization Method
- Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange
- Encryption with Hash Functions
- Digital Signatures
Those are the concepts that make me scared. As far as the problems we should be able to know, I have no idea what to expect in regards to:
- Signing documents using RSA or ElGamal
- Describe strengths, weaknesses, and attacks for algorithms we have studied in class.
As I have been studying I am consistently pleased with how much more sense the mathematics makes the second time around. There are many ideas that I understand now that I didn't know when I first read and learned about them. That is making me more confident in my ability to do well on the test and I'm hoping that as I keep studying they will continue to make more sense as opposed to me just memorizing what to do.
As far as questions that I expect to see on the exam, I am guessing there will be a problem regarding finding a square root, a problem regarding calculating exponentials modulo n, and calculating Jacobi or Legendre symbols. I bet there will also be a problem where we are asked to describe one of the primality tests or factorization tests, and one where we are given a cryptosystem ans asked to describe a weakness or strength of it.
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