Introduction to Cryptography

Graduate / Professional

This course introduces modern symmetric and public-key cryptography as well as their broad applications, both from a theoretical and practical perspective. There is an initial emphasis on fundamental cryptographic primitives (e.g., block ciphers, pseudorandom functions, pseudorandom generators, one-way functions), their concrete efficiency and implementation, as well as their security definitions and proofs. Ways of combining such primitives that lead to more complex objects used to secure today’s internet (e.g., via TLS), such as key exchange, randomized encryption, message authentication codes, and digital signatures are also studied. The last part of the course is devoted to modern and more advanced applications of cryptography (some of which are deployed at scale today), such as authenticated data structures, zero-knowledge proofs, oblivious RAM, private information retrieval, secret sharing, distributed consensus, and cryptocurrencies. (e.g, Bitcoin). TTh 11:35am-12:50pm