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Book Review, © Copyright 2002, Jim Loy
This is the interesting story of a young, Irish woman and her science fair project. Her project was an attempt to show that the Cayley-Purser algorithm (as she named it), of number theory, could be adapted as a great improvement to public key cryptography. The algorithm was much faster than previous methods. If this were a fairy story, Miss Flannery would have won a Nobel Prize or something like it, and science would have been advanced greatly. Unfortunately, the algorithm is flawed from a cryptologic perspective; it can be attacked, and its hidden prime number keys can be deduced. As a public key cryptographic method, it is much less secure than previous methods. This attack upon the algorithm is an interesting part of the story. And her project rightly won national and international awards. The book also gives an interesting introduction to the related basics of number theory and public key cryptography.
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