Sec 7.3-7.5 due May 11th

What was difficult?

Following some of the math was again difficult. It is hard sometime to keep track of all the symbols and what not. The equation showing why ElGamal works took a couple reading thru to fully understand why tr^-a is equal to m (mod p). Also the section on security of ElGamal was a bit dense to read through. This reading was easy compared to previous readings on Discrete Logarithms tho.

Reflections:

The section on bit commitment was pretty cool. Implementing a way to show bob the predictions via one-way functions was interesting. The key exchange protocol mentioned in section 7.4 was also cool as you can use one idea to send the key securely, then use the key for another cryptosystem. Also the section on ElGamal Cryptosystem was good. Like RSA, I am amazed at how "hard" math problems can be used to give Eve all she really needs, yet, still have her be unable to decrypt messages.