Spring Break Assignments

Project Progress

Before Monday, 14 March at 11:59pm every project group should send me an email containing:

• A clear description of what you plan to do for your project
• A list of readings you have or will read to get background on your project topic
• A plan for how you will divide responsibilities among your team members (not necessary for solo projects)
• A list of questions you have

Readings

Before Thursday, 17 March class, read Chapter 8 in the textbook and the two attached papers:

Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman. New Directions in Cryptography, 1976.

R.L. Rivest, A. Shamir, L. Adleman. A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems , 1978. This is the original RSA paper, perhaps the most important paper published in any field in the last 30 years. You should read it first in a "special" location like the Rotunda or a lawn garden (or a beach or ski lodge if you are so fortunate to be on one for Spring break). Then, you should read it again in a normal study location.

Useful Proof Methods

Proof by intimidation: "Trivial" or "obvious."
Proof by exhaustion: An issue or two of a journal devoted to your proof is useful.
Proof by omission: ``The reader may easily supply the details'', ``The other 253 cases are analogous''
Proof by obfuscation: A long plotless sequence of true and/or meaningless syntactically related statements.
Proof by funding: How could three different government agencies be wrong?
Proof by lack of funding: How could anything funded by those bozos be correct?
Proof by democracy: A lot of people believe it's true: how could they all be wrong?
Proof by reference to inaccessible literature: The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Icelandic Philological Society, 1883. This works even better if the paper has never been translated from the original Icelandic.
Proof by forward reference: Reference is usually to a forthcoming paper of the author, which is often not as forthcoming as at first.
Proof by flashy graphics: A moving sequence of shaded, 3D color models will convince anyone that your object recognition algorithm works. An SGI workstation is helpful here.
Proof by vehement assertion: It is useful to have some kind of authority relation to the audience, so this is particularly useful in classroom settings.
Proof by vigorous handwaving: Works well in a classroom, seminar, or workshop setting.
Proof by cumbersome notation: Best done with access to at least four alphabets, special symbols, and the newest release of LaTeX.
Proof by lack of space: "The proof is not detailled due to lack of space in this proceedings..." works well in conjunction with proof by forward reference.

Selected from http://www.ai.sri.com/~luong/research/proof.html.
None of these proof methods are suggested in your CS588 problem sets or exams.

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

cs588–staff@cs.virginia.edu