What was the most difficult part of the material for you?
I thought the most difficult part of the reading were the cipher feedback (CFB), output feedback (OFB), and counter (CTR) modes of operation. The electronic codebook (ECB) and cipher block chaining (CBC) were pretty straightforward, but the last three took me some time to try to figure out, and I'm still not sure I see how CFB and OFB are different.
What was the most interesting part of the material? How does this material connect to something else you have learned in mathematics? How is this material useful/relevant to your intellectual or career interests?
I thought the sections about breaking DES and password security were interesting, especially that people weren't really sure that DES was secure for the last 10 years of its use and it could be broken in four and a half days by the last few years it served as a standard. I also think it's cool that people have thought about how most computer users actually choose passwords and try to make weak passwords more secure for them.
No comments:
Post a Comment