Fall 2018

Section 1: TTh 3:00pm 2113 JKB

Midterm #1 Study Guide

  • terminology and cryptography slides

  • AES: how it works, finite field multiplication

  • block cipher modes: differences between them, what an IV is for

  • cryptographic hash functions: their properties and applications, how SHA1 works

  • MAC: their properties, why a CBC is vulnerable to a bit-flipping attack, different ways to implement a MAC, what an HMAC is, how the MAC attack lab works, how the HMAC works (what does Alice send Bob, how does Bob check it)

  • Diffie-Hellman: what it means for two numbers to be relatively prime, what GCD is, modular arithmetic, additive and multiplicative inverses, modular exponentiation, how Diffie-Hellman works (what Alice sends Bob, what Bob sends Alice, how they get the resulting key), why DH is secure, how you could attack DH

  • RSA: textbook description of RSA, why RSA is secure, how to choose and/or calculate RSA parameters, how you use RSA, how to calculate the d parameter using the Extended Euclidean Algorith, by hand

  • PKI: what a digital certificate is, how signing a certificate works, steps needed to verify a certificate, how the CA system for the web works, what Let's Encrypt does, weaknesses of the CA system, how Certificate Transparency works and what problem it solves, tradeoffs of various revocation methods