Q&A, due October 4

• Which topics and ideas do you think are the most important out of those we have studied?
• I think the most important topics we have talked about are AES and DES. I think the other ciphers helped us to better understand the math that will be used later on in the course. I think AES and DES are most important because they are more recent. 
• What kinds of questions do you expect to see on the exam?
• I expect more conceptual questions on the exam. I think that most of the questions will be more about the process and ideas behind encryption as opposed to just brute computing the cipher or plaintext.
• What do you need to work on understanding better before the exam?
• I would like to better understand linear recurrence and how we can figure out the linear recurrence given a sequence. Also, I don't understand how man-in-the-middle attacks are performed.