2.9-2.11 due April 11th

What was difficult?

I found section 2.11 to be the most difficult to read through of all the sections thus far. The material wasn't really straight forward and easy to assimilate. Also, the proofs were a bit thick. I had to read through the examples a couple of times to understand what the meaning of the matrices were and what they were actually trying to solve. I am still a bit fuzzy on some of the stuff and hopefully it will be cleared up in class.

Reflections

I really liked the section about Pseudo-Random Bit Generation. As a computer science major, I use random numbers all the time as well as come up with system to create random numbers using hardware. It was interesting to read about how the random number generators I usually work with are in fact not cryptographically secure. It seemed weird to me that it is possible for people to predict the next numbers in the "random" sequence. It was also cool seeing the methods proposed by the book that are cryptographically secure.