Faculty Of Computer Studies

T215B
Communication and Information Technologies (II)

Midterm Assessment
Version 1 – Answer Key
Spring – 2012/2013
Day and Date
Number of Exam Pages: Time (2)
()
(Including this cover sheet) Allowed: Hours

Instructions:

1. The use of calculators is allowed

2. Write the answers on the separate answer booklet
3. The exam consists of three parts:
A. Multiple Choice (10 marks): You should answer All 10 questions
B. Essay Questions (40 marks): You should answer 8 questions out of 10
C. Problem Solving (50 marks): You should solve all problems

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Part I: Multiple Choice Questions (10 marks)
This part consists of 10 questions carrying a WEIGHT OF 1 mark each. You must answer
ALL of the following Multiple Choice questions. You are advised to dedicate approximately 20
minutes to this part

1) What is the decryption key for the Caesar cipher with encryption key of 10?
a. 16
b. 18
c. 10
d. 26
e. 6
2) This idea of a brute force attack can be applied to:
a. transposition ciphers
b. substitution ciphers
c. both “a” and “b”
d. scytale
e. none of the above
3) How many different arrangements would be possible using the letters of the word
‘article’?
a. 5040
b. 2520
c. 1260
d. 840
e. None of the above
4) Using a computer that can perform 1012 calculations a second, roughly how long
would it take to try all possible permutations of 10 different letters?
a. 3.6 microseconds
b. 1.8 microseconds
c. 3.6 nanoseconds
d. 1.8 nanoseconds
e. None of the above
5) One way to decouple from the linguistic patterns of the plaintext is to encrypt with a
cipher that uses a succession of different keys. An example of this is
a. Kirshoff cipher
b. Volta cipher
c. Vigenère cipher
d. Dmitri cipher
e. None of the above
6) Whether accomplished in hardware or software, encryption frequently involves an
operation known as the:
a. XNOR process
b. XOR process
c. NOR process
d. NAND process
e. None of the above

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 7) The quantum cryptography works by exploiting properties of _______ to distribute a
secret key that can then be used to encrypt messages in the traditional way.
a. protons
b. neutrons
c. photons
d. electrons
e. none of the above
8) One of the characteristics of biometrics against which it can be judged is________ where
it indicates how well the biometric separates one individual from another.
a. Distinctiveness
b. Permanence
c. Universality
d. Collectability
e. None of the above
9) ________________are the ones most commonly used by fingerprint recognition systems.
a. Lake and independent ridge
b. Termination and bifurcation
c. Island and spur
d. Spur and crossover
e. c and d.
10) What is the minutia type for the grid pattern shown in the figure below? Note that each
box in the grid represents a pixel and the minutia is detected by running an image
window that is 3 × 3 pixels.
a. Termination.
b. Island
c. Spur
d. Crossover
e. None of the above

Part II: Short Questions & Problems (42 marks)

This part consists of 10 questions carrying a WEIGHT OF 6 marks each. You must answer
ONLY 7 of these questions. You are advised to dedicate approximately 50 minutes to this part

11) From your study, you have encountered five recurring themes which together provide a
framework that can be used for analysing the technologies used in “Protecting from
Prying”. What are these five themes?
• convenience
• identity
• reliability
• acceptability
• consequences.

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 12) Privacy comes in many forms, relating to what it is that one wishes to keep private. In
this context, you have studied the following terms: privacy of confidentiality and
privacy of anonymity. Define each one of them.
• privacy as confidentiality: we might want to keep certain information about
ourselves, or certain things that we do, secret from everyone else or selected
others;
• privacy as anonymity: we might want some of our actions (even those done in
public) not to be traceable to us as specific individuals;

13) What does the term RFID stands for? How can it be used in surveillance?
• RFID (Radio Frequency Identification): tags that are small wireless devices
that provide unique identifiers which can be read by remote sensors.
• There are RFID tags which can be ‘active’ – they emit signals over a greater
range and can be sensed remotely.
• These tiny devices are inconspicuous, meaning that an individual might not be
aware that there is an RFID tag in a product they have bought which is
transmitting information, nor will they be aware of who is able to pick up the
data.

14) What is “Cryptology”? Where does the term get its roots from?
Cryptology is the branch of science concerned with this concealment of information and
is the study of codes and ciphers. Cryptology is a word that has its roots in Greek from
kryptos (hidden) and logos (word).

15) Define the act of breaking (or cracking) a cipher. How can we measure the strength of a
cipher?
• The act of breaking (or cracking) a cipher is to derive the plaintext from the
ciphertext without knowledge of the key (and often without knowledge of the
encryption algorithm). The strength of a cipher is measured by how long it takes
to break it.

16) What will be the output of the XOR process if the 7-bit ASCII code for N (1001110) is
combined with the randomly generated coding data 0011101?

ASCII code 1 0 0 1 1 1 0
Random data 0 0 1 1 1 0 1
Output 1 0 1 0 0 1 1

17) One of the basic approaches to block encryption is the electronic codebook (ECB) mode.
Explain briefly this approach. Use diagrams to explain your idea.
• Electronic codebook (ECB) mode encrypts each block independently of any
other. The encryption key for each of the blocks can be separate (different), or the
same for each block. The main drawback of ECB mode is that two similar blocks
of plaintext will result in similar blocks of ciphertext. Also, the data to be
encrypted here is not always text, sometimes pictures.

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 18) Explain briefly the symmetric key system used for encryption.
• Symmetric key system is one for which encryption and decryption are performed using a
single key or, as in the case of the Caesar cipher, two keys that are so closely related to
each other mathematically that they can really be regarded as a single key, as one can
easily be derived from the other. The inherent problem with all single key systems is
secure key distribution.

19) What does the term “Biometric” stands for? What does it used for?
• The term ‘biometric’ comes from two Greek words: bios, meaning life and metron
meaning measure. So a biometric relates to the measurement of living beings, and is
generally used to relate to a measurement or set of measurements of human beings that
can be used to identify them in the context of authentication.

20) In fingerprint matching, the intra-class variations or differences are

particularly problematic as they are much more likely to happen. Mention four
reasons for such variations.
• displacement (different parts of the fingertip are presented to the sensor)
• rotation (the fingertip is presented to the sensor at a different angle)
• pressure of the impression (the finger is pressed on the sensor with a
different force)
• skin condition (on different occasions the fingertip may be dry, wet,
scratched or dirty)
• condition of the sensor surface (on different occasions the surface may be
clean, dirty or greasy)
• feature extraction accuracy.

Part III: Long Questions & Problems (48 marks)

This part consists of 4 questions/problems carrying different WEIGHTS that are shown in front of
each one. You must answer all the problems. You are advised to dedicate approximately 50 minutes to
this part

21) You have studied in Block 4 the “UK Electronic Voting Project” as one of the case
studies that discusses the reliability of an electronic voting counting. The UK Electoral
Commission that was set up by the UK Parliament to ensure the integrity of the electoral

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 process had a legal duty to report on the conduct of all elections and referendums in the
UK. The commission has detailed some observations on the electronic voting that was
used in 2000, 2004, and 2008 elections. Point out only six of these observations.
(12 Marks)

• The elections were overseen by an independent body called ‘London Elects’ which contracted a
private company, Indra, to supply the scanners to count the votes. Indra in turn sourced the
scanners from Fujitsu.
• The volunteers were quietly asked, by a member of the London Elects team, not to pursue too
many detailed questions about the technology since they would not be of interest to other
observers.
• At the same demonstration, the suggestion that a statistically significant sample of ballots should
be manually counted in parallel with the electronic counting was rejected by London Elects
officials.
• The results of the software audits were kept secret.
• Several presiding officers at polling stations were unhappy with the ballot boxes.
• ‘Family voting’ was observed where more than one person was allowed to enter the polling booth
thereby breaching voter privacy.
• Broken scanners were observed being replaced by others which had been previously stored
insecurely.
• Some faulty scanners marked ballot papers.
• Some of the information on the observer screens was obscure.
• So there was no explicit visible check on whether the machines might have been programmed to
switch votes to a favoured candidate.
22) Write out the ciphertext resulting from encrypting the letter ‘f’ using the
Caesar cipher with a key of 6, using mathematical notation and evaluate the result.
Use the grid shown below to translate between alphabetic symbols and numerical
values. (12 Marks)

f = 5. So when the key is 6, the calculation becomes: 5 + 6 ≡ 11 mod 26.

The numerical value 11 represents the letter ‘L’, so the result of encrypting the plaintext letter ‘f’
with a key of 6 is the ciphertext letter L.

23) Two of the biometrics that can be used in security systems are the Gait and
the Iris pattern. Give a brief explanation of each one. (12 Marks)
• Gait: This is the way someone walks so is a behavioural biometric.
• It is relatively difficult to capture, normally involving working on a video sequence.
• It is also computationally intensive and so not suitable for realtime authentication.
• But it does have the benefit (in some situations) of being able to be captured at a
distance, and without the subject’s knowledge.
• Iris pattern: This is the pattern of the iris in the eye so is a physiological biometric.
• It is unique for each eye and for each person.

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 • Iris images can be captured at a (small) distance, but the capture does require the
subject’s cooperation so that the iris is at the correct distance from the camera.
• For some subjects, the light that is necessarily shone on the eye can cause irritation.

24) Assume that the sender and the receiver have agreed to use a columnar
transposition cipher to encrypt their messages. Further, say that they agreed to use
the codeword “Tuesday”, and agreed that the transposition is to reverse the order of
the letters of the codeword and then swap pairs of letters, starting at the right-hand
end. What will be the ciphertext for the message: “Communication and information”?
Detail your work.
(12 marks)

Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3

T U E S D A Y Y A D S E U T Y D A E S T U
c o m m u n i i n u m m o c i u n m m c o
c a t i o n a a n o i t a c a o n t i c a
n d i n f o r r o f n i d n r f o i n n d
m a t i o n x x n o i t a m x o n t i m a

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