Problem Set 4: Cryptology for the Masses

Out: 29 October 2001 Due: 5 November - Topic Email Due: 12 November - Final

Collaboration Policy: Read Carefully

Since no one has submitted a satisfactory humiliation-free matchmaking protocol, we have arbitrarily assigned students partners for the problem set. You are required to work on this problem set with the pseudo-randomly selected partner as listed below:

Mah, Matthew Hutchins, Eric Neve, Michael Erdman, Jon Peeters, Eric Liang, Stephen Glaser, Adam Wills, Portman Lahr-Vivaz, Emilio Guanlao, Dante

McEachron, Errol Woody, Leonard Barger, Tracy Wortman, Dana Friedman, David Browne, Keen Parikh, Stavan Esclapez, Allison Hogye, Mike Lebanidze, Eugene

Hughes, Thad Walsh, Brian Sarfaty, Josh Bangash, Saud Wolf, Joe Cuvelier, Michael Marinak, Chris Vu, Lim Sowers, Adam Pickering, Ken

Calandrino, John Farraher, Rob Roy, Samir Zeng, Jim Shi

Each pair should turn in exactly one response, and both members will receive the same grade (unless someone does not pull their fair weight on the assignment). If you have an idea for a bigger project and would like to combine with another problem set pair, that may be possible, but discuss it with me first.

You may consult any outside resources you wish including books, papers, web sites and people. If you use resources other than the class materials, indicate what you used along with your answer.

Assignment

There is a real need for today's average computer user and citizen to understand technical issues in computer security. Many attempts to do this are either littered with outright falsehoods and misleading statements, or fail to explain things well enough for politicians, lawyers or average computer users to understand.

For this problem set, you are to produce something that presents an important issue relevant to cryptology or computer security in a way that will be accessible and useful to an audience without substantial technical knowledge. Your response may be in any medium: for example, a song (Bit Commitment Blues by Mike Stay - this would be worth a C), poem (How to decrypt a DVD: in haiku form by anonymous author, from David S. Touretzky's DeCSS Gallery - this would be worth an A+), comic strip (Dilbert's Random Number - this would be worth an A), article (worth an A+ if you get it published (Cav Daily counts) and it is technically sound), or Web Site (Microsoft's Safe Internet: Privacy and Security Fundamentals would be worth a C- for false and misleading technical statements; The Ten Immutable Laws of Security would be worth an A).

On or before Monday, 5 November, each problem set team should email me a short description of what you are doing to make sure it is consistent with the intent of this assignment.

While creativity is encouraged, you should not let your choice of medium get in the way of technical correctness. Technical correctness is essential to get a good grade on this assignment. Secondary criteria include the quality and organization of your response, its perceived effectiveness in getting the main ideas across to a non-technical audience, and the actual impact of your work.

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

David Evans evans@virginia.edu