6.2, due on October 13

1. (Difficult) The whole continued fractions concept is still a little fuzzy, which made understanding the low exponent attack difficult.  I may have followed the theorem at first (not sure), but eventually kind of gave up.  The idea of using roots is also not immediately obvious.  Also the general idea behind the timing attack is understandable but the statistics and the details are confusing.  I suppose I was a little less focused than I usually even am.
   I hope things make more sense in class or after homework if we will need to know this going ahead.  It does seem like important things to understand for actually implementing an RSA scheme.
2. (Reflective) These attacks are a little scary.  I presume that any commonly used implementation avoids these issues as much as reasonable.  I would be interested, though, to know if any attacks like these have succeeded in the real world.