I am going to reverse engineer an encryption algorithm...

[K.I.L.E.R]

It is a requirement for my basic programming class.

Teacher says it won't be hard, is it normal for such things to occur at basic levels of programming for C++?

PS: This thing makes me kind of nervous.

 

[DemoCoder]

What do you mean by reverse engineer? Is he going to give you compiled code and you have to rewrite it in C?

Or is he asking you to find the decryption key for a given encrypted text?

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

Or is he asking you to find the decryption key for a given encrypted text?

Yep.

He is going to give us a file that encrypts and somehow we are supposed to reverse engineer it for the key.
Then we have to make a key for a specific file.

He said we are going to simulate sending files across the internet.

This has got me confused. The bad thing is that it will be a part of the exam. :?

 

[Simon F]

If it's anything more than just a simple substitution cipher or perhaps an LFSR based (i.e. very weak!) stream cipher then you've got your work cut out.

 

[DemoCoder]

Maybe it'll be rot13 . Enigma would be an interesting challenge.

is he telling you what encryption algorithm is being used or do you have to figure that out to? That gets into the realm of cryptanalysis, which seems unusable for a basic comp-sci class.


Perhaps he will give you a simple keyspace (say, 24-bits) and you can brute force it.

 

[Captain Chickenpants]

Simon Singh's 'The Code Book' is an excellent read, and has info on how to break most of the simple codes.

CC

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

is he telling you what encryption algorithm is being used or do you have to figure that out to? That gets into the realm of cryptanalysis, which seems unusable for a basic comp-sci class.

Nope, he never said what encryption method is being used. BTW: This is not a computer science class.

Just software development.