ICS 280: Introduction to the Theory of Cryptography
Winter Quarter, 2004
tentative outline
list of reference
readings
handouts (and
homeworks)
Instructor:
Stanislaw Jarecki
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Class times: Tu-Th, 11-12:20
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Room:
CS building, room 243
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Class number: ICS 280, Section C
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Class code: 36783
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Office hours: Mon 3-5, and otherwise by appointment or just by
stopping by
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Textbook: None, but lots of material is
available on-line (see more below)
Course Description:
This course is an introduction to modern cryptography for graduate and advanced
undergraduate students. At the end of the course, the students
will be able to understand current research in cryptography and, if
interested, pursue such research themselves. The cryptographic
toolkit we will cover will be also useful for students interested
in algorithms or in security.
Modern cryptography provides tools for the design of provably
secure protocols. It shows that complex security
requirements of modern computer systems can be satisfied by algorithms that are
provably secure against adversarial attacks, assuming some
well-defined computational complexity assumptions. Existence of such
proofs allows practitioners to build computer systems whose security
rests on firm foundations. However, the resulting computer systems
are secure only to the degree that they are implemented correctly (an
issue we will not cover in this class), and that the security
requirements imposed on the cryptographic algorithm correctly
represent the operation of the system, and hence the types of attacks
that can be launched against it. We will touch on this
last point quite often in our class, whenever we discuss the security
requirement of any cryptographic tool.
This winter quarter course is intended as an introductory class, and
so we will start with the fundamentals of modern cryptography and
gradually move up to more complex cryptographic tools, which can then be
applied to building secure protocols. The primary focus of
the class will be on:
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Definitions: We will see how to
conceptualize the goals of security (e.g. "secure
communication"), and by doing so we will define cryptographic objects
(i.e. algorithms or protocols) of increasing complexity, like one-way
functions, collision-resistant functions, pseudorandom functions, signature
schemes, encryption schemes, and others. We will define the
needed properties of these objects by drawing examples from
their practical applications.
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Constructions, protocol design, composing systems from cryptographic
objects, rigorous proofs of security: We will see how to
achieve various security goals and construct the
corresponding cryptographic objects which provably meet the
required properties under well-defined computational difficulty
assumptions, e.g. the assumption that factoring is difficult. In
general, we will see how to construct more complex cryptographic objects from
simpler ones, and how the resulting tools can be used to satisfy requirements
of actual applications.
The most important lesson of this course should be not any particular
cryptographic construction, but the approach of modern
cryptography: (1) the importance of defining the security
requirements of the application at hand, and (2) knowing
how to go about arguing if (and on what grounds) a proposed algorithm
satisfies these requirements.
Tentative Outline:
See the tentative
outline for the list of topics we will cover.
Background Reading List:
See the list of
reference texts for the course
Grading:
There will be about 4-6 homework sets (counting 70%) and a take-home final
(20%). You will be expected to actively participate in the
class. Depending on the attendance level, 10% of the grade will be
either for class participation or for scribing the lecture notes.
Prerequisites:
There are no formal prerequsites for this class. However:
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You should be comfortable with proofs, with elementary probability, and have
the basic knowledge of discrete math used in computer science
(e.g. ICS.6A).
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It's recommended that you have some algorithms class (like ICS.161) and
you are familiar with assymptotic analysis of algorithm running time.
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It'd be also good if you took a computability/complexity class like ICS.162, so
you are familiar with P/NP and the notion of a reduction between
computational problems.
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It will help to be familiar with basic algebraic concepts (groups, fields), and
number theory concepts (e.g. primality), but you don't have to have a class in
it.
The last three topics listed above will be briefly reviewed in class. In
fact, if you are missing some of this background, see the reading
list link above for review material which is available
on-line. Even if you do not have all the background listed above,
you will be able to pick it up from the class review, and then consult
the listed textbooks when needed.
This class is complementary to other UCI classes on security/cryptography:
No previous experience in cryptography or security is necessary for this class
(see the prerequisites above), but for those students who have taken or are
thinking of taking other UCI classes on security/cryptography, here is a word
of explanation why this class differs from and complements the related UCI
classes:
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ICS 168/268: Students who took ICS 168/268 are very much encouraged
to take this class. The two classes cover different material and can
be taken in any order. The reason the two classes complement each
other well is that ICS 168/268 focuses on breadth of
cryptographic algorithms and secure applications, while this class focuses
on depth, by laying out a systematic approach to the
study of any
secure algorithms and protocols.
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Math 173A: Similarly, students who took and liked "Intro to
Cryptology", Math 173A, are encouraged to take this class
too. The material differs, but Math 173A is a very good introduction and
background for this class. Math 173A teaches number theoretical
foundations of the two most famous public key algorithms, i.e. the
RSA encryption/signature schemes based on the factoring assupmtion, and the
encryption/signature schemes based on the discrete logarithm
assumption. This is a very useful and fun material, but from
the point of view of crypto theory as taught in this class, what Math
173A shows is that a specific cryptographic object called a one
way function can be efficiently built from
particular number-theoretic assumptions (discrete log or factoring).
In this class we will take the assumption that one-way functions can
be constructed as more or less our starting point (!), and we will
see how to build more complex cryptographic objects on this and other
assumptions (see further info in the tentative course outline below).
Last modified: 07 Jan 2004