Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Section 16.1 due Nov. 29th

(Difficult)
I was a little confused by the use of the point at infinity as an additive identity. I understand that not all groups have the same additive or multiplicative identities ( we are most familiar with zero as the additive identity, and one as the multiplicative identity, under normal addition and multiplication), but I am not sure I understand the explanation of why infinity is the additive identity.


(Reflective)
 I am glad that the book clearly stated the fact that elliptic curves form an Abelian group. This was something I think I would not have noticed on my own, but it gives elliptic curves a lot of great characteristics for use in cryptography. As we saw with previous cryptosystems, systems which form groups have many advantages, and often a few disadvantages as well. In our examples of DES, it was critical that DES was not a group for Double DES or Triple DES to be effective. I am curious how Abelian groups fit into cryptography.

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