Applied Cryptography (CY-603 (B)) - Important Questions

How would you test a piece of cipher text to determine quickly if it was likely the result of a simple substitution? Explain.

Compare shift cipher, monoalphabetic substitution cipher and polyalphabetic substitution cipher with suitable examples.

Critically analyze the security of RSA.

List number theory candidates for cryptographic primitives. Define factoring and related problems and their role in cryptography.

What are the design principles of block ciphers? Explain.

Explain the operation of the DES algorithm.

List the main features of the SHA-2 cryptographic hash function and identify the kind of compression function used in SHA-2.

Explain Message Authentication Requirements and what are the attacks related to message communication? Discuss.

Compare DES, Triple-DES and AES. Explain substitution/permutation networks and Feistel networks.

Explain message authentication: notion and schemes with reference to CBC-MAC.

Explain collision resistant hashing with reference to MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2, SHA-3, HMAC and Merkle-Hellman.

Explain about Traffic Confidentiality.

Explain the RSA algorithm.

Compare secret key, private key and public key.

Write short notes on any three of the following: (a) Symmetric vs asymmetric encryption (b) RSA variants (c) El Gamal encryption (d) Hybrid encryption.