CSC 290 Introduction to Cryptology
An unsolved code. Two sides of the
phaistos disk
Information
Course: CSC 290 Introduction to Cryptoplogy
Instructor: Randal C. Nelson
TA: David Ahn,
Office hours Monday 2:00-3:00, Thursday 11:30-12:30, CSC 620.
Time: TR 2:00 - 3:15
Room: CSB 601
Summary
This course is a one-semester introduction to cryptology,
covering material from classic ciphers to modern encryption methods,
along with some history.
Topics
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Classic ciphers and attacks and variations on them: Caesar shift,
monoalphabetic substitution, one-time pad, affine cipher, Vigenere cipher,
Hill cipher, block permutations, etc.
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steganography - grills, texts, digital sound and imagery.
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Mechanization: rotor machines and the German Enigma
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Modern symmetric ciphers - DES, AES, etc.
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Public-key ciphers: RSA, Diffie-Hellman Key exchange, ElGamel, IDEA.
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Quantum cryptography
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Miscellaneous mathematics from various sources: probability and statistics;
number theory (integers mod m, prime numbers); groups, rings, and fields;
algorithms, computational complexity.
Prerequisites
The course contains considerable mathematical content, though an in-depth
treatment of the mathematics behind modern cryptology is beyond its scope.
If you do not like math courses, you will probably not like this course.
As a prerequisite, you should have at least calculus and basic linear
algebra.
Material from probability and number theory will be introduced.
There will be a number of cryptoanalytic exercises, so you should like
working on word puzzles. Many of them will require use of a computer,
so you should enjoy writing programs, and have taken a data structures
course (e.g. CSC172).
Course Text Books
The required texts are
- "Making, Breaking Codes" by Paul Garret (Prentice-Hall 2001).
- "The Code Book" by Simon Singh (Random House, Anchor Books, 1999).
Other useful books
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"Applied Cryptography" by Bruce Schneier (John Wiley and Sons, 1996).
A useful, in-depth reference for modern cryptography
-
"The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing" by David Kahn
(Scribner, 1996).
THE classic, massive tome (1188 pages), if you want more history than
Singh provides.
Grading
Cryptanalysis projects and problem sets
final project and presentation.
Approximate distribution: Projects and problems sets, 50%; Final project, 30%;
Class participation, 20%.
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