The Computer Science
curriculum at St. Norbert College culminates with the completion of an
individual project integrating and extending concepts from across the program.
Each student is given a primitive proposal, tailored to his or her own
interests, and is then encouraged to develop and extend upon the basic
requirements to experiment with unique designs and implementations of
solutions.
The focus of my education has been merging theoretical Computer Science with
Mathematics. Cryptography inherently assimilates these two disciplines. The
foundation of cryptology is probability, and successful cryptanalysis requires
massive amounts of number crunching. Therefore, I believe the computer has
aided in advancing the study of cryptography and enhanced cryptanalysis.
My project objectives included: implementing an XOR encryption algorithm to
code (or decode) a text given a key, given an encrypted message (without
knowledge of the key) use cryptanalysis to produce the original message,
analyze the various methods used, and develop a user interface to allow web
surfers to test out the process. This website outlines my progress on the
project and offers project details. Feel free to explore or check out the final
interface here.
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