CS 668A Foundations of Cryptography

CS/CpE 668A Foundations of Cryptography

Prof. Rebecca Wright
Burchard 124
Thursdays 6:15-8:45pm
Fall 2004

Corrected HW4 now available:

Course description

This course provides a broad introduction to cornerstones of security (authenticity, confidentiality, message integrity, and non-repudiation) and the mechanisms to achieve them. Topics include: block and stream ciphers, public key cryptosystems, key management, certificates, public key infrastructure (PKI), digital signatures, non-repudiation, and message authentication. Various security standards and protocols such as DES, AES, PGP, and SSL are also discussed.

Prerequisites: CS/MA 503 (Discrete Mathematics for Cryptography) and either CS 600 (Data Structures and Algorithms) or CS 434 Theory of Computation, or permission of the instructor.

Textbooks

Douglas Stinson, Cryptography: Theory and Practice , second edition, CRC Press. (Required). A list of errata is also available on-line.

Alfred Menezes, Paul van Oorschot, and Scott Vanstone, Handbook of Applied Cryptography , CRC Press. (Optional). I think you will find this a useful supplement to the main text. It is accessible on the web, at http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/ .

You can also find useful background on computational aspects of number theory and algebra on-line, in A Computational Introduction to Number Theory and Algebra by Victor Shoup.

The tutorial by Heys on linear and differential cryptanalysis is very well written and provides more detail than the text.

Syllabus

The syllabus for this course: ps | pdf .

Teaching Assisant

Sun Qi (River), sunq (at) cs.stevens.edu .

Office Hours

River's office hours are Thursdays, 3-5pm in Lieb 101.
Prof. Wright's office hours are Tuesdays, 3-5pm in Lieb 216.