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.