6.5-6.7 and 7.1, dur October 27

1. (Difficult) I thought that section 6.6, An Application to Treaty Verification was somewhat difficult to follow.  Usually examples for signature schemes seem to be straightforward, but the idea of A having a device in B's country, but that was still under A's control was a little confusing.  Perhaps it was the goal of the section to cause to me think a little about signatures in a new and interesting application; if so, then it succeeded.
2. (Reflective) I'm curious how much influence Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper had on the arrival of public key cryptography.  I wonder if RSA would have still been developed, but described in different terms?  Perhaps the math for some of the existing public-key systems would not be known to this day, because people wouldn't have had as much motivation to think about the problem?  From the book's description, I think it was very bold to propose such a framework without a specific implementation.  Perhaps doing this allowed them, and others, to think about the problem broadly, rather than as one specific technique, allowing for more creative techniques to be created (discovered?) than otherwise would have been.  It would be interesting to hear the history of the development of public-key cryptography.
   (I might have blogged on a subject similar to this before, but I may often talk about similar ideas on this blog).