Introduction to Modern Cryptography

Introduction to Modern Cryptography 2012

Life after "Introduction to Modern Cryptography"

• Talk to Christian about the possibilities of doing a semester project or master project in cryptography. He can also hook you up with other cryptographers, at CWI or in the rest of the Netherlands (and the world), working in all kind of different areas (crypto & algebraic geometry, elliptic curves, public-key crypto, information-security aspects etc.).
• Join Serge Fehr's course about quantum cryptography at the university of Leiden, starting January 2012.
• Follow Dan Boneh's crypto course or security class starting in January 2012 at Stanford, but available online.
• Spread the word to your fellow students about Introduction to Modern Cryptography v.2.0 starting in September 2012. :-)

Crypto challenge

Contents of the course

This course offers an introduction to this fascinating subject. After a quick treatment of historic cryptographic schemes, we will set out the formal definitions to be able to investigate perfectly-secret and computationally-secure encryption, pseudorandomness, hash functions, and message authentication codes and block ciphers. While these primitives are referred to as symmetric-key primitives (because the involved parties use the same keys), another important class are public-key (or asymmetric) primitives which allow for public-key encryption and digital signatures. The most well-known example is the widely-used RSA system.

If time allows, we will cover more advanced cryptographic notions such as secret sharing, bit commitment, zero-knowledge and multi-party computation.

Over the last years, cryptography has been transformed from an ad-hoc collection of mysterious tricks into a rigorous science based on firm mathematical grounds. Our treatment will therefore be rather formal and precise in the mathematical definitions. In particular, this is NOT a course in computer security. You will not learn how to break or hack systems. We will not teach you "how to secure your system"; cryptography is only one aspect of security.

Prerequisites

Material

• [KL] Jonathan Katz and Yehuda Lindell, Introduction to Modern Cryptography, Chapman & Hall / CRC, 2008

There will be material and research articles to read which are not in the book. Here is a useful list of other text books and references by Jon Katz.

Lectures and Exercise sessions (2 x 45min each)

Homework, exam, and grading

There will be homework exercises every week, handed out after the Tuesday lecture, to be handed in one week later before the start of the next lecture session. The answers should be in English. If you can, please send your solutions to Joachim (joachim@joachimschipper.nl) (LaTeX-generated PDFs preferred, but readable scans of handwritten solutions are fine). Cooperation is allowed, but everyone has to hand in their own solution set in their own words.

Instead of a final exam, students are required to study a research paper about a topic not covered in class and give a 30-minute presentation (20 minutes talk, 10 minutes questions) to the class in the week of 5 December. A list of possible topics is now online. For help in understanding the paper and preparing the presentation, students will have individual meetings with Joachim or Christian.

The final grade for the course consists by 2/3 of the average homework grade (ignoring the worst 2 grades) and 1/3 of the grade given for the final presentation.

Questions about the material are always welcome, and should be sent to Joachim.

Preliminary course schedule