Thoughts about Exam 2

(copy-and-paste the questions):

• Which topics and ideas do you think are the most important out of those we have studied?
  
  I think the general concepts of public key crypto systems, hash functions, and digital signatures ares important for us to understand.  I think RSA, in particular, is a relatively simple system, and we can probably look up the details again and remember generally how it works.
  
  
• What kinds of questions do you expect to see on the exam?
  
  I would expect a thought question regarding public key crypto systems.  I would also expect a small RSA example.  Using square roots to find factors wouldn't be too surprising.  Using the Chinese Remainder Theorem or modular exponentiation would also be reasonable.  We've also focused on the birthday attack, and I could see a question on that.  I would be surprised if there were questions asking us specifically about some of the complicated factoring or discrete-log finding algorithms, but I should probably understand what makes keys weak.
  
  
• What do you need to work on understanding better before the exam?
  
  I am struggling with understanding primitive roots.  I also would have a hard remembering the complicated algorithms, so I'll have to decide what the appropriate amount to try to understand is.  I also don't always understand why they work.
  
  
• Are there topics you are especially interested in studying during the rest of the semester? What are they?
  
  I would like to understand some of the math behind Elliptic-Curve-based Identity Based Encryption.  Also, I noticed we skipped the Random Oracle Model.  I've seen this mentioned before, so it would be great to learn about this.