Chapter 20 of 24 - Public-Key Cryptography

Well that's a pretty sexy title isn't it. Shame I'm not being examined on any of it.

I got half-way through the first section on "cryptosystems based on modular arithmetic" before I decided to pick my battles wisely and return to chapter 19. As a consequence I never got to the meaty bit of the material. -namely encryption and decryption in the RSA cryptosystem.

The second section that I got nowhere near was "cryptosystems based on elliptic curves". This section looked difficult and lengthy, so I'm glad I discovered it wasn't examined before I reached it.

I'll keep this chapter in the back of my mind in case I want to revisit it at any point in the future (after my exam).

So, this brings me to the end of Book E on rings and fields. Normally at this point, I would've finished the related assignment by now, but I'm still very much stuck on the question related to splitting fields. I'll spend the next day or so trying to make as much sense as I can of it to pull out a few extra marks.

Next up is the last book, Book F, and the last four chapters on metric spaces. Home stretch...