On pedagogically sound examples in public-key cryptography

Chong, S.K., Farr, G., Frost, L. and Hawley, S.

Pencil-and-paper exercises in public-key cryptogra- phy are important in learning the subject. It is de- sirable that a student doing such an exercise does not get the right answer by a wrong method. We therefore seek exercises that are sound in the sense that a student who makes one of several common errors will get a wrong answer. Such exercises are difficult to construct by hand. This paper considers how to do so automatically, and describes software developed for this purpose, covering several popular cryptosystems (RSA, Diffie-Hellman, Massey-Omura, ElGamal, Knapsack). We also introduce diagnostic exercises, in which all error paths lead to different answers, so that the answer given by the student may suggest the nature of their error. These too can be generated automatically by our software.

Cite as: Chong, S.K., Farr, G., Frost, L. and Hawley, S. (2006). On pedagogically sound examples in public-key cryptography. In Proc. Twenty-Ninth Australasian Computer Science Conference (ACSC 2006), Hobart, Australia. CRPIT, 48. Estivill-Castro, V. and Dobbie, G., Eds. ACS. 63-68.

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