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December 15, 2005

In Class This Week ...

I discussed digital signatures in my last class.  One of the students asked me why the sender would bother to encode the message digest using its private key.  After all, anyone can obtain the sender's public key and decode the message, so why bother encoding it at all?

I tried three or four answers to that question -- none made much sense to the class (or me) -- it became a real mish-mash of a lecture.  Finally, I gave up and said I'd email the answer as soon as I could figure it out.

Because it was the last lecture, I then passed out the course evaluation forms.  Given the mish-mash I'd just made, I'm not looking forward to their opinions on "clarity of instructor's explanations" and "knowledge of the instructor."  Why fall on my face immediately prior to the evaluations?  Oh, well.

Posted by DavidK at December 15, 2005 04:20 PM | Permalink

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