Interesting - In this class I have been most fascinated with the methods of cracking different cipher systems. Up until now most of the cipher systems were relatively easy to crack using frequency analysis or other basic methods. The block cipher seemed to have a very secure method by the description in the book, but I was interested in how easy it was to find the encryption key using a simple plaintext attack. This made me think about the security of real-life cryptosystems, and how not only the key itself, but the machine (or in todays world, the computer program) that generates the encryption must also be protected. I read an article recently about using electrical analysis of encoding "machines" to determine how the machines work. It occured to me that cryptography has expanded to a plethora of scientific fields. No longer a matter of mere mathematics and logic, cryptography relies on computer science, electrical engineering, statistics, analysis, etc.
Difficult - The most difficult part of the reading for me was understanding the playfair cipher. I understand that it is a form of a block cipher, but using matrices and modular arithmetic seems far easier than memorizing steps to encode characters based off of rows and columns. I tried to encrypt a few characters myself, and found I spent far more time referring back to the instructions then actually encrypting anything. I also do not understand exactly how the decrypting process works.
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