Sec 8.3 due May 23rd

What was difficult?

Understanding how SHA-1 works at all was very hard. It was difficult to make sense of the algorithm. I kind of was able to follow the steps, but it was very difficult to make sense of it all. I was hard to see what the algorithm was trying to accomplish mainly because it is an iterative algorithm and unless you use an example as you go it is hard to see what exactly is going on at each step.


Reflections

It is strange how much work is needed to come up with a secure hashing algorithm. It was also interesting to see how many times "good" hash functions are found out to actually be insecure. I have heard of both SHA and MD before as they are used a lot in computers for verification purposes. I believe they are also used to read computer virus signatures which programs like norton and sophos use to identify viral files.