Author: Stephen Tse <[redacted]@cmu.edu>
A demonstration of the Merkle-Hellman Knapsack Cryptosystem, one of the earliest public key cryptosystems in 1970s. It should have been coded in C though, as bit manipulation on strings in Java is suprisingly troublesome and inefficient, but well here's assignment requirement to you... :/
Because the algorithm generates large public / private keys proportional to the maximum bits of a message to be encrypted, this demo limits the maximum characters allowed per turn to 150. Nontheless, it already consumed about 433MB RAM on my computer! Consider reducing MAX_CHARS if this is still too much for your machine.
Note that the cryptosystem has been cracked by a polynomial-time algorithm.
