I'm a student that trying to get on a national science fair with a project on Cryptography. I have few problems mainly the advancement of this topic although I already have a good background about it but I also need some help. Also, I have a problem that I don't have a mentor now or such a technical adviser. So I have bunch of questions and I will mention some of them here; which aren't the technical one for now .
1- I created somehow a cryptosystem that based on irrationals, however, what should be my hypothesis in this case or my problem statemt
2- How shall I do my experiments on such a topic???
3- Is there anyway for someone to find a mentor or a technical adviser and can I ask such questions here or this is only for general questions?
Cryptography is quite an interesting area. Please see some information on your questions:
1. Give us some more information on your project, as to what are you wanting to do? Based on that information experts in this forum may be able to guide you to formulate a hypothesis.
2. On how you can do your experiments; also depends on item 1 above and what are you planning to do. So provide more info.
3. This is the right forum for guidance, help and questions -general or specific - on projects. The volunteer experts in this forum are from all areas of academia and industry and should be able to guide you.
Projects dealing with math, engineering and programming (and your may be touching all those areas) can pose a challenge when trying to fit them into the traditional science fair methodology of the scientific method. This Science Buddies resource page (https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ring.shtml) has an excellent description of how to approach engineering/programming projects. Take a look at that and see if it might address your first two questions.
For your 3rd question, our communication mode of posting questions and answers here does not make for a very effective mentor relationship. Your best bet is to have a mentor that you can have a live conversations with. For that, I point you to yet another Science Buddies page at https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... tors.shtml.
These articles just might do the trick for you. But, if not, ask away here and we’ll see what we can do to help.
Well, let me describe it a little bit more
I created a Cryptosystem that is mainly depends on the properties of irrational numbers and the length of its expansion. So write now I just created such a thing and I want to expand it and test it and make as a science fair project. That's why I get confused I search hardly to find a mentor but no results so far since our country isn't that experienced on science fairs and those stuff. And I'm lost now .
So please give me any idea you have or an advice.
Hi Hasan,
I'm assuming that you have devised some new functions for encryption and decryption, something which sounds very interesting.
In terms of a project, there would seem to be two main possible directions. The first would involve analyzing your functions, to demonstrate their potential for ensuring security. In short, this means showing why, given an encrypted item, it is extremely difficult to decrypt it unless you are in possession of some secret extra information that feeds into the standard decryption function. There are different models for attackers: cyphertext only, known plaintext, and chosen plaintext - whether the attacker just has access to encrypted items, or access to specific encrypted/decrypted items, or can try encrypting any items they like. Having said this, it is usually extremely hard to demonstrate convincingly that a cryptosystem is secure. This is evidenced by the history of the subject, where people find holes even in very established standard cryptosystems. So this is likely to be over-ambitious for a short science project.
The second direction would be to take what you have devised, assume it provides some level of security, and then test its practical usefulness for security applications. For example, ensuring confidentiality of messages sent between people is the obvious one. Authenticating people - confirming someone is who they say they are - is another. For some application, you could ask questions like: how fast is it to compute your encryption and decryption functions compared to other methods, or how easy is it to include your functions in some existing security application?
Thanks for your reply Gordon, for me I will choose choice 2 for the time being but I just still confused of how I can test my hypothesis and record the results
"our country isn't that experienced on science fairs and those stuff"
I would have to argue against this statement. If I were in your position, I would email college professors regarding being a mentor. I for one have asked an computer science professor at Stony Brook University to mentor me, and he took me in with open arms.. dont give up!
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