Barcol hardness test the Barcol impressor was developed by Walter Colman as a hand-held, portable means of assessing the hardness of a material during World War II. The United States Army Air Corps required a hand-held method of checking the hardness of rivets due to concerns that aircraft could be sabotaged by replacing normal rivets with soft lead or wooden ones which would fail during flight. The impressor operates when the tip is pressed against the material in question. The hardness of the material determines how far the tip indents and this is transferred by a tension spring and lever to be read
Computational hardness assumption an average-case hardness assumption is stronger than a worst-case hardness assumption for the same problem. Furthermore, even for incomparable problems, an assumption like the Exponential Time Hypothesis is often considered preferable to an average-case assumption like the planted clique conjecture. Note, however, that in most cryptographic applications, knowing that a problem has some hard instance (i.e. a problem is hard on the worst-case) is useless because it does not provide us with a way of generating hard instances. Fortunately, many average-case assumptions used in cryptography (including RSA, discrete log, and some lattice problems) can be based on worst-case assumptions via