Course Goals
- Understand the mathematical underpinnings of cryptographic systems and be able to analyze their security.
- See how a problem-centric approach brings many different ideas and fields of math together to solve problems.
- Practice communicating mathematical ideas in writing and in oral communication, and translating technical mathematical ideas for a lay audience.
- Relate your mathematical knowledge of cryptographic systems to newsworthy events and policy issues.
You can find a link to the syllabus here.
Notes
- Week 1: Intro to Cryptography
- Week 2: Cryptanalysis
- Week 3: Block Ciphers
- Week 4: Information Theory
- Week 5: Discrete Logarithms and Key Exchange
- Notes
- No slides
- Week 6: Public Key Cryptography
- Notes
- No slides
- Week 7: Elliptic Curves
- Week 8: Elliptic Curve Cryptography
- Week 9: Knapsack Encryption
- Notes
- No slides
- Week 10: Ring Learning with Errors
Homework
- Week 1, due Thursday September 7
- Week 2, due Thursday September 14
- Week 3, due Thursday September 21
- Week 4, due Thursday September 28
- Week 5, due Thursday October 5
- Week 6, due Friday October 13 (At 4pm in my office)
- Week 7, due Thursday October 19
- Week 8, due Thursday October 26
- Week 9, due Thursday November 2
- Week 10, due Thursday November 30
Final Presentation
Schedule:
- November 9
- Tristan Boblet (Hashing Functions)
- Lyra Yu (Pseudorandom number generators)
- Dylan Jirsa (Zero-knowledge proofs)
- Jay (Coding theory)
- November 16
- Katie Begerow (DES)
- Shuyu Ding (Digital Signatures)
- Sara Packer (Cryptocurrencies)
- Elliott Smith (Steganography)
- November 30
- Ian Li
- Eva Wang (KRACK)
- Sherry Hou (real-world vulnerabilities
Potential topics:
- Pseudorandom number generators (Lyra Yu)
- Hashing functions (Tristan Boblet)
- Coding theory
- Collision attacks
- Sources of real-world vulnerabilities (Sherry Hou)
- I’d love for someone to explain the KRACK attack that broke Wifi this week (Eva Wang)
- DES block cipher (Katie Begerow)
- Primality testing
- More on elliptic curves
- More on lattice-based cryptography
- Digital signatures (Shuyu Ding)
- Zero-knowledge proofs (Dylan Jirsa)
- Man-in-the-middle attacks
- Cryptocurrencies (Sara Packer)
- Error-correcting codes
- Coppersmith attacks on RSA
- Other