The following are some potential exam topics, taken from the course notes and slides:

1. E-commerce overview.
   • Issues in implementing commerce online: identity, atomicity, non-repudiation, negotiation, exchange.
   • Aspects of e-commerce: Discovery, Negotiation, Exchange, plus Encryption and Security.
   • More Issues: How to deal with very large search spaces. Differences between designed and emergent economies. Sale and distribution of information.
2. What is an agent?
   • What separates an agent from an object/subroutine/daemon?
   • Why (and when) is it useful to look at a piece of software as if it is an agent?
3. Encryption:
   • Terminology: code, cipher, plaintext, ciphertext, etc.
   • One-time pads - theoretical security, practical problems.
   • What is the key distribution problem?
   • Symmetric Key Encryption:
     • Stream and Block Ciphers
     • Cipher Block Chaining
     • Caesar Cipher
     • DES
     • RC5
   • Asymmetric (Public-key) Encryption:
     • RSA
     • What are one-way functions and trapdoor functions?
     • What are hash functions?
     • Basics of modular arithmetic
   • Larger issues in encryption:
   • Practical security and problem difficulty - keyspaces, attacks.
   • Digital Signatures and authentication - how do they work?
   • Zero-knowledge protocols - what are they? (dual signing)
   • Attacks: What are they and how can they be avoided?
     • Man-in the middle attacks
     • Passive vs. Active attacks
     • Impersonation Attacks
     • Reflection Attacks
   • Watermarking:
     • Uses (Authentication, copy protection, usage tracking)
     • Challenges in implementing watermarks
     • Attacks
   • Public Key Infrastructure - requirements
   • Certificate Authorities
   • Trust Models
   • Protocols:S/MIME, SSL
   • Session-oriented vs. Message-oriented protocols
4. Discovery:
   • Structure of the Web (Core, upstream, downstream, islands)
   • Estimating web coverage
   • How search engines work:
     • Components of a search engine
     • Indexing web pages
     • Crawling the Web
     • Deciding where to crawl next
     • PageRank
   • Web Services
   • XML, DTDs, structure of XML documents, XSLT.
   • Representing and transforming data.