Past lectures

Abstract

The series of lectures will cover important up-to-date topics in modern cryptography. It will assume knowledge of elementary number theory, basic algebra such as group and field theory, and basic discrete probability theory. Here is a brief syllabus. Mathematical foundations: primality testing, finite fields, elliptic curves, factorization and discrete log algorithms. Basic cryptographic algorithms: Public-key encryptions, digital signatures, key exchanges, zero-knowledge proofs, authentication oblivious transfer, secret sharing, secure distributed computations. Probabilistic encryption and semantic security. Attacks on cryptographic systems and algorithmic countermeasures. Plaintext awareness and proofs of plaintext knowledge. Information theoretic and absolute everlastin security for encryptions. The lectures are mathematical on nature, but practical considerations and applications will also be discussed.