Cryptology Research for High School Student? 43
John3 asks: "My daughter is enrolled in an Advanced Science Research (ASR) course, at the local high school. The students join the program in 10th grade, choose a research topic, and then locate a mentor to work with them on their topic until high school graduation. My daughter took a cryptology course this past summer, and now she has chosen cryptology for her ASR topic. Most HS students pick mainstream research fields (medicine, genetics), so her science teacher is a bit unsure of where my daughter might locate a cryptology research project appropriate for advanced high school students (especially one that doesn't require security clearance). I'm hoping my fellow Slashdot readers might know of current cryptology/cryptography research projects that offered opportunities for a high school student to participate."
Math teachers! (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as an HS student who's done CS research (Score:1, Insightful)
The key point is for her to clock in the background knowledge by spending time each day learning more. However, it needs to be self motivated with no outside pressure, else it won't be a fun and trully motivated effort.
Cryptography for fun and... more fun. (Score:4, Interesting)
We started with simple stuff like letter substitution, ROT13, etcetera. And then moved on to masking and all sorts of fun/complicated algorithms. This was very educational, in the sense of learning about cryptography. We learned interesting concepts, and rapidly developed tools/scripts/methods for attempt to decrypt arbitrary strings.
Much fun.
- shazow
Replicate the MD5 Collision Stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
2 cents,
Queen B
No, replicate something easy! (Score:2)
This is hard (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This is hard (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is hard (Score:1)
Re:This is hard (Score:1)
There's nothing too formal needed to experiment with nondeterministic models of computation.
Re:This is hard (Score:2)
Just because it's a new fi
More Needed (Score:1)
Mentor (Score:3, Interesting)
The point is, lots of companies now use encryption in their products, and there is lots of interesting research to be examined about how products are using encryption (lots of products do it pretty bad, but a few do it really well). Go find a drm product, or vpn product, or any wifi developer and they will be doing something with crypto. Look at the work by the girl who optimized DES (? irrc, might have been aes) as her high school project.
That being said, if you think you've got a new encryption algorithm at that age, you will probably see it as an example problem in your crypto classes later on in life. Leave new algorithm to the
Call the local college (Score:1, Interesting)
Sera
not sure but there's a good summer program (Score:4, Informative)
Find a protocol and break it (Score:1, Interesting)
CPRM [4centity.com] might be a bit advanced for high school, but a practical break is an undergraduate homework assignment. (Hint: Assume you have known plaintest for the encrypted media key. How many trial encryptions do you have to do before find
University Researchers (Score:2)
Re:University Researchers (Score:1)
and you'll have a chance of finding someone who actually knows what they're talking about.
Re:University Researchers (Score:2)
here [berkeley.edu] and here [avirubin.com]) via a post in the sci.crypto newsgroup.
Re:University Researchers (Score:1)
Re:University Researchers (Score:1)
Not exactly research, (Score:2)
I don't mean to be insulting (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I don't mean to be insulting (Score:1)
No offense,
Dr peacegoddss
Definitely possible (Score:3, Insightful)
For an idea of where cryptography research is going these days, she should read eprint.iacr.org. A lot of those papers are pretty technical and heavy going, but it will at least give some starting points.
The biggest problem I'd see is not finding a feasible problem, but finding a teacher capable of marking it. I know none of my high school teachers could have marked my cryptography research.
Re:Definitely possible (Score:1)
Some ideas (Score:5, Insightful)
Before you can answer that question, you have to figure out what is meant by "research". There's fairly little in the area that professional cryptographers consider to be research that would be accessible to even a very precocious high school student.
However, it's doubtful that the intention of this project is actually to advance the state of humanity's cryptographic knowledge. Realistically, the goals is to find a challenging and educational project for the student, and something that is not obvious to most non-cryptographers.
Given appropriate expectations, I think there are lots of things a fairly sophisticated high school student could do that would be worthwhile, particularly if you want to look beyond cipher design. Some of the areas that might be interesting include:
Never underestimate the power of a high schooler (Score:2, Insightful)
I went to a Magnet high school ( http://mbhs.edu/departments/magnet/ [mbhs.edu]) (a public school that takes in the top 100 students from the county to teach them an advanced curriculum) and part of the requirements for earning a Magnet diploma was to do a Senior Research Project (SRP) that sounds very much like ASR. To find a mentor (I wanted to do theoretical computer science, I had done some independent research on graph theory in my own time) I emailed a professor at the University of Maryland and worked over my 1
Why not the more open area of information leakage? (Score:1, Interesting)
However there's lots of exciting forms of information leakage exploits that a high school student with a modicum of math & computer background could explore, especially if they spent a little while studying an introductory machine learning or information theory textbook. For example:
1. crack passwords by listening t
Re:Why not the more open area of information leaka (Score:2)
That reminds me of something I read about predicting company mergers by new domain name registrations (whois).
Ask the nearest university (Score:1)
A true reasearch project might be somewhat of an undertaking, but
they can probably find something appropriate.
BTW - don't cheat yourself of trying Simon Singh's CD-rom
on cryptology: http://www.simonsingh.net/Shop_-_Crypto_CD-ROM.ht
cryptology museum (Score:2)
How about PGP? (Score:2)
Perhaps something a little less maths-y (or math-y if you're US-ian). She could study the use of PGP, the basics behind the cryptography, it's place in current email systems, historical export restrictions, why it's not used more, it's cipher strengths, how many nano-seconds it takes the NSA to crack it.
Ask Zimmerman to mentor it! Worth a shot?!
The Code Book: Simon Singh - http://tinyurl.com/d5zjs [tinyurl.com]
Wikipedia ent
Two essays, and a pointer (Score:4, Informative)
Just thought I'd toss in my few cents.
Bruce Schneier has a couple of essays that you might want to have your daughter check out. (Hopefully she already knows the info in the first, but....)
Here [schneier.com] is his imput on how to get into the crypto field.
Why is crypto so hard [schneier.com] .
If you or she aren't so keen on working with a local college/university math/CS department, I second the advice to hit up Phil Zimmermann. His site [philzimmermann.com] lists a number of ways to contact him. It also talks about his current project. (I found Mr. Zimmermann to be very gracious. I think the worst he would do is say no. More likely he would either agree or suggest someone as a alternative.)
I can think of a project (Score:2)
The most obvious method is to encrypt the data but in order to selectively retrieve it becomes a problem (and over the years we do come back to our archives).
Another method I think might be great, is a way to just encrypt/protect the sensitive/identifying fields in a database and leave the statistical data unencrypted (
It's all historical... (Score:2)
Re:It's all historical... (Score:1)
Re:It's all historical... (Score:2)
Current research projects (Score:1)
http://www.isg.rhul.ac.uk/research/projects.shtml# current [rhul.ac.uk]
Personally, I think protocol analysis is pretty interesting, as the world gets increasingly networked up. Or investigate the practical effects of the recent breaks in hashing algorithms on other products that use the hashes (like digital si
American Cryptogram Association (Score:1)
Their resources page has links to everything you'll need to get started, from stuff covering cryptographic history to online lessons teaching you how analyze ciphers, and not just
Re:Don't bother... (Score:2)
The ASR projects don't have to be original research...the student will usually just work on an existing project in cooperation with their mentor. Seriously, what amazing research project would a high school student do in genetics, cancer, astronomy, etc.? Cryptography is certainly "hard" but solving some encryption puzzle is not necessarily tougher to comprehend than decoding DNA or curing cancer or AIDS.
John