(Difficult) The concept of a trapdoor was a little confusing to me. I can understand how it might be possible to find an easier way of dealing with a one way function, but it is hard to imagine why the designer of the original function would have any advantage in finding a trap door over anyone else. If everyone has access to the public encryption method, it would seem that everyone would also have an opportunity to try to find a trapdoor. It would be nice to see an example of how this might work to better understand how a trapdoor could be built into a cryptosystem.
(Reflective) The RSA challenge was a great example of overestimating the security of a cryptosystem. It was interesting to see that they estimated it would take 4 x 10^16 years to decrypt the message, but in reality it took less than a year in 1994. It goes to show how important it is to analyze a cryptosystem and look for its weaknesses before making any assumptions about the overall security.
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