Introduction to Cryptography
Computer
Science 281/481
University of Rochester
Spring 2021
Instructor: Muthu Venkitasubramaniam
Time: TR 2:00-3:15
Place: Virtual (Check blackboard for zoom link)
Course Web page: http://www.cs.rochester.edu/courses/281/spring2021/
Office Hours: By appointment
TA: Laasya Bangalore (lbangalo@ur.rochester.edu), Office Hours: TBD
Overview
Modern cryptography studies techniques for facilitating interactions between distrustful entities. Today, with the advent of the Internet, these techniques become indispensable – enabling, for instance, anonymous electronic elections, privacy-preserving electronic auctions, internet banking and more. In this course, we will introduce some of the fundamental concepts, protocols with rigorous proofs of security.
Prerequisites
CS 280 (or equivalent), MTH150 (or mathematical maturity), or permission of
instructor.
The main skills that will be assumed from these courses are: 1) the ability to
understand and write formal mathematical definitions and proofs and 2) comfort
with reasoning about algorithms, such as proving their correctness and
analyzing their running times. It is also important that you are familiar with
basic probability.
Course Administration
We will be using Blackboard for this course.
Grading
Homeworks (30%) - There will be 5-6 homeworks.
Quizzes (30%) - There will be a quiz every class.
Midterm (30%) - There will be two midterms. (Midterm 1: 3/18, Tentative date for Midterm 2: 4/20)
Project (10%)
Homework Policy
You are free to collaborate with a maximum of two other students on the homework, but you must turn in your own individually written solution and you must specify the names of your collaborators. You are allowed refer online material but you are not allowed to solicit solutions online. You must specify any and all online material that you referred. On midterms, you are not allowed to collaborate with other students and you are not allowed to refer any material beyond the resources specified on this webpage. Note that it is a violation of this policy to submit a problem solution that you are unable to explain orally to me. All homeworks and midterms have to be typeset.
Reading
Lecture notes covering a large fraction of the course can be found here [PS] (course notes developed by Rafael Pass and abhi shelat).
There is no required text for the course other than lecture notes. You may find the following two books to be useful references. Note, however, that we will not always be following the same notational conventions as these books.
· [KL] Jonathan Katz and Yehuda Lindell. An Introduction to Modern Cryptography. This is an introductory textbook on cryptography. The level of the material and the mathematical treatment is similar to the one we will use in class. However, this book does not cover all of the material that we go through.
· [G] Oded Goldreich. Foundations of Cryptography. This is a very comprehensive treatment of the theoretical foundations of cryptography. Volume I and II include most of the material that we cover in class, but at a far greater depth and (at a more advanced level). This book is a great reference for students interested in more advanced studies in theoretical cryptography.
For a more applied treatment of cryptography, I suggest the following book which is available on-line.
· Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot, and Scott A. Vanstone. Handbook of Applied Cryptography.
For background reading on probability, algorithms, and complexity theory, I recommend:
· [CLR] Thomas H. Cormen , Charles E. Leiserson , Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein. Introduction to Algorithms.
· Michael Sipser. Introduction to the Theory of Computation.
Lectures Outline
2/2 Lecture 1: What can cryptography do for you? the match-making game and Kerchoff’s principles ([PS] 1.1, 1.2 )
2/4 Lecture 2: Historical Ciphers, Introduction to Modern Cryptography ([PS] 1.1, 1.2 )
2/9 Lecture 3: Basics of Probability (Pass's Discrete Structures course: Chapter 5 )
2/11 Lecture 4: Shannon secrecy, Perfect secrecy ( [PS] 1.3,1.4)
2/16 Lecture 5: Limit of Shannon secrecy, Basics of Computability ( [PS] 1.3,2.1)
Related Course
MTH 233: Introduction to Cryptography