Week 3 – Reading!

Aadit R -

Alright, another week down. To be honest, this week has been relatively uneventful regarding the project. I’ve just been reading Springer’s “An Introduction to Mathematical Cryptography” and made it up to Diffie-Hellman. The next chapter should be on RSA, which may be more directly applicable to my research, and the following chapters should result in more and more relevant topics for my current project (given that they cover elliptic curve and lattice-based cryptography).

So, instead of discussing this week, I suppose I should talk about my plans for next week. Given that I’m not finished with the textbook, I think that will be my first priority or at least to reach the sections discussing the encryption algorithms that I plan on implementing — RSA, elliptic curve, and lattices. I also plan on reviewing a few of the papers I found last week, looking into how the researchers performed their tests and figuring out the parameters they used to compare the algorithms. I might start writing the code and figuring out what data I want to encrypt, but I guess I’ll have to wait and see (I’m probably going to begin reviewing past literature before attempting to start on my own). But, regardless, by the end of next week, my goal is to finish reading the majority of Springer’s book and hopefully begin looking over some of the research papers I gathered. 

Anyways, that really is it from me this week. I know it’s not a lot to cover, but in the next few weeks, I should hopefully have more things to share.

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    aryan_r
    Hi Aadit! Great blog post. I was just wondering, was there a reason that you ended up focusing on "An Introduction to Mathematical Cryptography" as a source? There are probably a lot of introductory materials, so is there anything that makes this uniquely beneficial to your project? - Aryan
    March 19, 2025 at 11:54 am - Reply
    aadit_r
    Great question Aryan! My main goal was to understand the basics of the underlying mathematics behind specific cryptographic algorithms, so, when I looked for sources I could study from, Springer’s undergraduate textbook was consistently ranked well as a beginner-friendly introduction to the field as it essentially requires no prior knowledge to understand the text. Also, I found this source to be easily accessible (I was able to find an *ahem* “publicly available” version of the resource online). So given this reason, coupled with the fact that it seemed like a fairly straightforward introduction to the topic, I decided to rely on this textbook as a starting point for my research. Sure there are a few encryption algorithms that the book doesn’t go too in-depth into (it does state that the primary focus is on public key cryptography) and, truth be told, I have slowed down on my reading and am a bit behind where I expected to be by the end of this week, but it still seems like the most readable/understandable introduction I could find on the topic. Anyways, thanks for the question! Hope this answers it!
    March 22, 2025 at 5:49 pm - Reply

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