Sections 6.5-6.7 and Section 7.1, due Wednesday October 27

1. (Difficult) Is a trapdoor in RSA simply the decryption exponent, d? I would like to understand more about the connection with primitive roots and discrete logarithms. I still feel like I don't exactly understand how to find primitive roots and how that would be connected to discrete logs. Will you explain more fully why it is difficult to solve for x in a discrete logarithm?

2. (Reflective) I found it clever the way that Bob is able to know that a message comes from Alice. It makes a lot of sense to have Alice apply her decryption exponent and then Bob's public encryption, so that Bob is able to undo the message and know it was from Alice. I find it interesting how important one-way functions are. Often in other math classes we want to be able to easily compute (or find) the inverse of a function, but the inverse of one way functions are not supposed to be easily computed. I can certainly see the application and the need for one way functions for security. I liked the message for the RSA challenge. It was certainly not a message that someone could try and get and encrypt, using the public encryption exponent.