Summary
MENU General Guidelines for Technical Redaing Reading Mathematics Exercises

1. General Guidelines for Technical Reading

How to Comprehend a Technical Document and Grasp Its Essence Quickly and Accurately

1. Read an abstract of a document.
2. Skim through the document by looking at headings.
3. If you are looking for particular information,
   narrow down segments of your interest and read them thoroughly.
   Otherwise, read the first section (usually with the heading "Introduction" or "Getting Started") first.
4. If you are familiar with topics relevant to the document,
   look through references next and then read the last section (usually with the heading "Conclusion").

How to Search a Technical Document for Information of Interest

1. Look up a subject index if available.
2. Look up a table of contents if available.
3. Locate relevant sentences with a keyword search function built in software used to view the document.
4. Skim through the document by looking at figures and tables.
5. Skim through the document by paying attention to topic sentences (typically located at the beginning and/or end of each paragraph).

1. What does P2P stand for?
        
   A
2. Who proposed threshold secret sharing schemes?
        
   A
3. Describe concisely how shares are created in the idea based on hyperplanes.
        
   A
4. Describe concisely how shares are created in the idea based on a polynomial.
        
   A

One of the most critical issues in the field of computer security is secure distribution & management of a key in a cryptosystem. In 1979, Shamir and Blakley independently proposed the concept of threshold secret sharing schemes (refer to Secret-Sharing Schemes: A Survey and Secret Sharing Schemes). It is useful to store confidential information (called a secret) such as an encryption key by parties involved in communication both securely and reliably. If the confidential information is stored at a single site managed by a single party, then there is vulnerability such that the information is lost by a failure at the site. If it is replicated (at least partially) and dispersed over multiple sites, then the reliability is improved while a risk of information leakage increases by unauthorized access to some of the sites. Secret sharing creates shares from a secret so that the original secret can be reconstructed iff at least k shares are available, where k is called a threshold, and otherwise it is impossible. Each share includes partial information of the secret though, a share alone is useless and hence vulnerability due to leakage or loss of a share is avoided. Example 1: [proposed by Blakley] Consider a point in 3D space as a secret. Suppose that shares are planes including the point. If we have one or two planes, then we cannot determine the point. However, once we get three of the planes, we can easily determine the point that is an intersection of the 3 planes. This method can be generalized to an n-dimensional space where (n-1)-dimensional hyperplanes are used instead of planes. Example 2: [proposed by Shamir] Consider the first coefficient of a polynomial of degree t-1 as a secret. Suppose that the remaining t-1 coefficients are randomly chosen. Shares are distinct points that lie on the polynomial. Since a polynomial of degree t-1 is uniquely specified by t distinct points that lie on the polynomial, t shares are sufficient to reconstruct the polynomial of degree t-1 and hence the secret (i.e., the first coefficient) can be revealed. Secret sharing is also useful to secure communication in untrustworthy networks such as Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. Suppose that a computer sends a confidential message to another computer via P2P securely. Shares are generated from the message and delivered to the destination along distinct paths so that no intermediate computer receives a sufficient number of shares for reconstructing the message from the received shares. There is another application to cryptography called threshold cryptography. Regarding cryptography in general, refer to Handbook of Applied Cryptography by Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot and Scott A. Vanstone.

• Biomimetics
• The Hubble Telescope

2. Reading Mathematics

• American Pronunciation of Mathematics
• Reading Mathematics
• Handbook for Spoken Mathematics
• Pronunciations of Symbols

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   x + 2

1. Find the minimum hardware requirements for installing Microsoft Office Home & Student 2016 on a PC in the installation guide
   " How to install Office 2016 Suite".

2. Spell out the pronunciation of the following math formula.

   g(x) − 2 x g(x) + x² g(x) = (20 - 80 x + 2 x² + 40 x³) / [(1 - 4x)(1 - x)]

3. In the paper titled Project the Wiki Way: Using Wiki for Computer Science Course Project Management, find which user account an instructor uses to create a template page for a course.

4. Find how to turn off a web server's signature in Apache HTTP Server Version 2.4 Documentation.

5. Find the definition of "one-way function" in the following book.
   
   Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot and Scott A. Vanstone, Handbook of Applied Cryptography, CRC Press, 2001.