Exam Responses, due Nov 15

• Which topics and ideas do you think are the most important out of those we have studied?
• I think that public key cryptography is the most important thing that we have studied. It seems like it is the most widely used and thus most applicable.
• What kinds of questions do you expect to see on the exam?
• I think there will be questions on public key cryptography as well as primality testing. It seems this test will be more theoretical than calculations because so much of the homework and the concepts we talked about can only be done quickly on a computer. 
• What do you need to work on understanding better before the exam?
• I need to better understand the factorization methods as well as the strengths and weaknesses of particular algorithms. I also don't think I can find discrete logs very well using the Pohlig-Hellman or the quadratic sieve.