Hands-on Lab 6 - Encryption
Hands-on Activity
(DUE March 23, 2006 by midnight EST)
Laboratory Exercises on Encryption
This exercise introduces students to the concept of public-key encryption, and to the RSA public-key cryptosystem (used by permission). A student should be able to complete this lab in one hour or less.

PART I: RSA Public-Key Encryption Exercise

  1. Click here for the lab instructions that I distribute for this exercise, as a Microsoft Word (TM) document. (modified Janaury 20, 2003)
  2. Click here to download the Excel workbook. (Updated November 6, 2001)
  3. The lab makes use of an Excel (TM) workbook with three worksheets:

    Note that a dialogue box appears when you open this workbook. Since this spreadsheet does not contain any macros, you may choose to "Disable Macros" (they were used in an earlier version of the spreadsheet). Before using the spreadsheet it is necessary to add in the Analysis Tookpak and The Analysis ToolPak VBA (from the "Tools" menu). This is explained in the lab instructions.

 

PART II: Key-Sharing Exercise
This exercise introduces students to the concept of key sharing. The instructions motivate this as a means to provide for the recovery of a lost key without revealing the entire key to any one person. I have chosen to use the Chinese Remainder Theorem for this, primarily because it's simple but also because it's mathematically interesting. Most classes are able to complete this exercise in less than one hour.

  1. Click here for the instructions for this lab. Once again, this is a Microsoft Word document.
  2. Once again, this exercise makes use of a Microsoft Excel (TM) workbook with two worksheets. Click here to download this workbook.
This lab is a modification from a lab by Dr. Benham at Montclair University (http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~benham/enclabs/)

Post-assignment: Answer the following questions -