Teaching Public Key Cryptography: A Software Approach.

Whether you are just starting to teach cryptography, or you teach it as a stand-alone course for computer science majors or as part of a complete major in cybersecurity, the question of how to provide hands-on experience is an important one. Some software may be too expensive, while other schemes only allow students to use small, toy examples. Here, a solution using a software package called bigint is examined. It can allow students to implement, try out, and try to break C++ implementations of most common public key cryptographic algorithms. Better yet, bigint is free and will run under Linux, which is often free as well. Thus, with this free software, students can implement common cryptographic algorithms, using large numbers instead of tiny ones, time how long the computations take, and investigate where the algorithms fail to work well -- the sort of exercises that help students more fully understand this technical and rapidly-changing field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]