Course Review for the Final Exam
CS 463
Lecture, Dr. Lawlor
The final exam is next week (Wednesday 5/8, 3:15pm), and the last
two class sessions are scheduled for project presentations, so I'm
doing the course review now!
We've covered a huge variety of material since the midterm.
You should know:
- Elliptic curve cryptography: what makes them secure, why
they're popular, why you might choose to use or not use
them in a project, how the math works, how the code works, and
where the holes are.
- Elliptic curve versions of Diffie-Hellman-Merkel (ECDH), and
the Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA).
- Networks: the basic IP/TCP/HTTP stack, SSL/HTTPS, certificate
authorities, binary and ASCII protocol design.
- Schemes for getting high performance: SSE for SIMD, OpenMP for
multicore, CUDA for GPU.
- BitCoin is interesting not only as a replacement for fiat
money, but as an application of all of the above.
Of course, you should still remember the important stuff from before
the midterm:
- Major categories of crypto algorithms: secret key, public key,
hashes, protocols.
- How Feistel-structured secret key ciphers work.
- How Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) public key crypto works.
- How Diffie-Hellman-Merkel key exchange works.