Some Possible Topics for Papers/Projects

Classical Cryptography
  • Breaking the Enigma Cryptosystem
  • Famous old ciphers that have not been broken

Modern Cryptology
  • Breaking the Merkle-Hellman Knapsack System
  • The Chor-Rivest Knapsack System
  • The McEliece Elliptic Curves System
  • Any of the AES finalist algorithms
  • Quantum Computing
  • Zero-knowledge Proofs
  • Clipper Chips

Coding Theory
  • The Golay Codes
  • BCH Codes
  • Trellis Codes
  • Codes used in the creation of Audio CD's
  • Goppa Codes
  • Quadratic Residue Codes