ECS 189A – Topics in Computer Science: Cryptography – Spring 2011

Announcements

• Grades are done and have been posted. As is my usual experience, the finals showed a wide variation: graded out of 145, the high was 133 (92%) (followed by 132, 127, 117,...), while and the low was 45 (31%) and the median was 85 (59%). If you wish to take a look at your final, you are welcome to do so by finding me this summer or fall.
• I’ve had a lot of fun teaching this class; hope you’ve had some fun taking it, too. Have a lovely summer. Work hard and play hard. PR

Information

• Lectures – grows with each class
• My office hours are up on my homepage.
• Course information sheet – you need to read this. Also, the flyer for the course.
• Your pictures in living color
• A sample LaTeX file and the pdf that it yields

Reading assignment to date

• All the book! Chapters 1-13 from [PP]

Problem sets

• PS 1 and PS 1 Solns
• PS 2 and PS 2 Solns
• PS 3 and PS 3 Solns
• PS 4 and PS 4 Solns
• PS 5 and PS 5 Solns
• PS 6 and PS 6 Solns
• PS 7 and PS 7 Solns

Reference materials

• The Markov Chain Monte Carlo Revolution, by P. Diaconis. Just the first four pages (don’t be intimidated by the rest), on breaking substitution ciphers.
• A Mathematical Theory of Communication, by C. Shannon (1948). A classic! Where “Shannon security” comes from.
• Trivium specification, by C. Canniere and B. Preneel (2006). Stream cipher your book chooses to discuss. Came out of the EU’s eSTREAM project.
• RC4, designed by R. Rivest. Widely used in Internet applications and WiFi networking—but not without problems.
• LFSRs (Wikipedia) and LFSRs (Corporate web page)
• DES as defined by NPS FIPS 46
• The Data Encyrption Standard (DES) and its Stength Against Attacks, by Don Coppersmith (1994)
• FIPS 197 defines AES (2001)
• Evaluation of Some Blockcipher Modes, by P. Rogaway (for the Japanese CRYPTREC project) (2011)
• The Birthday Problem, by M. Bellare (from our joint lecture notes)
• Authenticated encryption, by J. Black (2004). And another survey of the area, by G. Rose.
• Interview with M. Hellman, an interesting oral history (2004)
• FIPS 186-3 (DSS) (2009)
• Identity-Based Encryption from the Weil Pairing, by D. Boneh and M. Franklin (2003)
• A Fully Homomorphic Encryption Scheme, by C. Gentry (an example of what a great PhD thesis looks like).