CS588 Midterm Preparation

The CS588 midterm will be held Wednesday, 24 October in class. The exam will begin at 2:00. The midterm is open notes. You may bring anything to the exam that you think will help you, so long as it does not breathe, dim the lights when you turn it on, or communicate covertly or overtly with anything outside the exam room. You should not expect, however, to have a lot of spare time during the exam to look through sources.

Review Session: The TAs will hold a review session Monday, Oct 22 at 7pm on Olsson 005.

Due to the recent flooding in Olsson Hall, some mail servers became confused and some bits representing an email message floated to Alyssa P. Hacker's account. Although she hasn't been able to make much sense of them, she suspects they may be useful for the CS588 midterm. Being an honorable UVa student, she reported this to the course staff and we are making it available to everyone (even though there are some reasons to doubt its complete authenticity, and it was noticably not signed with a private key).

We believe the best ways to prepare for the midterm are:

1. Review the problem sets. Make sure you understand the selected answers.
2. Scan the attached "Flood Document" to get a sense for what the questions will cover. (Note: we do not recommend spending inordinate amounts of time trying to decrypt the encrypted parts of this document, but you can try if you insist.)
3. Try taking last year's midterm. You should attempt to solve the problems yourself (or with your study group) before looking at the solutions.
4. Go to the review session, Monday Oct 22.
5. Think about the questions on the manifests. If you can answer all those questions well, you will do well on the midterm.
6. Re-read the RSA paper.
7. Re-read the assigned sections of the book and papers.
8. Implement some of the cryptosystems we have seen in class.
9. Decrypt the questions in the "Flood Document".
10. Find a prime factor of:
    1881988129206079638386972394616504398071635633794173827
    0076335642298885971523466548531906060650474304531738801
    1303396716199692321205734031879550656996221305168759307
    650257059

These are listed in order of expected effect on your midterm grade / expected time required. We encourage everyone to do at least the first 4. If you do all 10, you are guaranteed to get an A in both the midterm and course.

University of Virginia Department of Computer Science CS 588: Cryptology - Principles and Applications

David Evans evans@virginia.edu