Theory and Practice of Cryptography Mini-Course

Introduction

This mini-course was taught in 2007 at Google. It is intended to be a brief survey for a general technical audience.

Video Lectures

• Classical to Modern Cryptography
• Using Cryptography in Practice
• Security Definitions and Proofs of Security
• Verifying Elections with Cryptography. Guest Lecturer: Ben Adida.
• Crypto Strikes Back! by Nate Lawson, with blog post and slides.

Lecture Slides

• Lecture 1: From Historical to Modern Cryptography
• Lecture 2: Cryptography in Practice
• Lecture 3: Theory of Cryptography
• Lecture 4: Cryptography and Voting

Suggested Readings

• Week 1:
  • "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt", Alma Whitten and J.D. Tygar.
    An (un)usability study of PGP.
  • "New Directions in Cryptography", Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman.
    A seminal paper in public-key cryptography. Recommended if interested in the underlying math of public-key crypto.
  • "A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems", Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman.
    The RSA paper. Recommended if interested in the underlying math of public-key crypto.
• Week 2:
  • "Snake Oil FAQ", Matt Curtin; "Snake Oil", Bruce Schneier
  • "Twenty Years of Attacks on the RSA Cryptosystem", Dan Boneh
    Good overview of many different attacks on RSA. Some technical details.
  • The HMAC Papers, The OAEP Papers, Mihir Bellare et. al.
    These are technical papers and demonstrate some of the difficulty in composing crypto primitives.
  • "Dos and Don'ts of Client Authentication on the Web", Kevin Fu, Emil Sit, Kendra Smith, and Nick Feamster.
    A great case study in practical web authentication. Recommended for engineers.
  • Bleichenbacher's RSA signature forgery
• Week 3:
  • Zero Knowledge Tutorial, Oded Goldreich
    This is a good introduction, but quickly gets pretty technical.
  • Probabilistic encryption, Goldwasser and Micali
    This paper introduced the idea of semantic security
• Week 4:
  • Secret Ballot Receipts: True Voter-Verifiable Election. David Chaum.
  • Scratch and Vote. Ben Adida and Ron Rivest.

Exercises

• Exercise Set 1
• Exercise Set 2
• Exercise Set 3

More Online Courses

• Cryptography and Cryptanalysis from MIT
• Advanced Topics in Cryptography from MIT
• Practical Aspects of Modern Cryptography from the University of Washington
• Using Cryptography Correctly from Stanford University

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