Thursday, September 30, 2010

Questions, due October 1

This prompt says, "as you study for the exam".  I haven't started studying much yet, but I have read over the study sheet and would would like to answer these questions, if that's OK.

Questions copied and pasted, I will fill in responses:
  • Which topics and ideas do you think are the most important out of those we have studied?
    • I really liked starting with some simple historical ciphers.  Although they may not be safe to use for very important things any more, it still provides a good perspective for cryptography.
  • What kinds of questions do you expect to see on the exam?
    • Now that we have the study sheet, I imagine that we'll see the types of questions that are given as examples on there.  Missing from these examples are proof-like questions.  I reckon there may be one or two of those on the exam as well?  I imagine there won't be any numerically complex or extremely long calculations, given the testing center calculators and time constraints.
  • What do you need to work on understanding better before the exam?
    • I don't know much about the attacks on Vigenère ciphers.  The online tool was easy enough to use, but I haven't tried the math behind it.  Also, I am not clear about everything that divisibility implies with modular arithmetic, and how all that fits together.  Some other things are probably a little fuzzy, but I hope that if they come up and we've done them before that I can remember.  I'll probably better know the answer to this question after the exam :-)

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