Summary

The directors of the project, Tim McDevitt and Tom Leap, supervised the creation of the C++ program ECrypt by Elizabethtown College students Amanda Schock (math) and Steve Bicker (computer science). The four of us worked together throughout a 10-week period in the summer of 2007 to create the software. The work went very well and we were able to add more features than we had originally anticipated. McDevitt beta-tested ECrypt with his FYS 100 “Cryptologic Mathematics” students in the fall of 2007 and McDevitt and Leap fixed all of the known bugs in the program during winter break. In January 2008, program was made freely available to the public at http://www2.etown.edu/ecrypt/ecrypt.htm.

      McDevitt gave a talk titled “ECrypting Images and Sounds” at the national joint meetings of the American Mathematical Society, Mathematical Association of America, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, etc… on January 9, 2008.

Participant students Amanda Schock and Steve Bicker gave a talk titled “ECryptology” at the Elizabethtown College Scholarship and Creative Arts Day on April 22. They showed the campus community some of the features of the software.

     McDevitt and Leap had a paper titled “Multimedia Cryptology” accepted by Cryptologia. The article discusses using ECrypt to teach introductory cryptology courses.