Description
Problem 1: Write two programs, one for public key encryption and another for hybrid
encryption, to compare the performance of public key encryption and hybrid encryption.
Your programs should have a sender function and a receiver function, and you could
use the main program as a communication medium to transfer the data between the
sender and the receiver. Your programs should take as an input a path to a large file
stored on the disk, encrypt it, and then decrypt the resulting ciphertext, and output the
encryption and decryption time. It is important that the input file be large because the
difference in performance may not be noticeable with small files.
Problem 2: Write a program that takes as input from the user a path to an arbitrary file
stored on disk and outputs a digital signature on this file and the verification key. Your
program should also allow the user to enter the file path, the digital signature, and the
verification key, and outputs “valid” if the signature is valid and “invalid” otherwise.
Problem 3: Write a program for an append-only ledger. Your program should take fixed
length strings as an input from the user, append it to the ledger, and store this ledger on
hard disk. When you execute the program, it should load the previously stored ledger
from the hard disk, append any new strings, if any, to the ledger and store the new
ledger to the hard drive again. Every time, the ledger is loaded from the hard drive, your
program should ensure that it has not been tampered.
Problem 4: Write a program to find a nonce such that SHA256(nonce || your-name)
produces a hash that starts with at least 9 zeros in hexadecimal or 36 zeros in binary.
your-name is your full name, e.g., if I were to do this problem, it would be
SHA256(nonce || muhammadnaveed), and || denotes concatenation. In addition to
submitting your code, there will a thread on Piazza to post your nonce and you must
post your nonce to that thread before the deadline to get credit for this problem. Your
program may take more than a week to find such a nonce, so please start early.
