CMSC656 — “Introduction” to Cryptography

Course description

This is a graduate course in cryptography. It will assume comfort with the basic building blocks of cryptography taught in undergraduate courses on cryptography/security and privacy: symmetric key encryption, public key encryption, message authentication codes, digital signatures, and hash functions. Students are expected to be comfortable with formal reductions and have some prior exposure to game-based security definitions. These building blocks will be very briefly reviewed at the start of the course, but students lacking this background are encouraged to invest the necessary time to catch up.

This course will be primarily theoretical, in that students will be expected to write definitions, design protocols, formally analyze security, and prove theorems. However, we will be primarily focusing on primitives that support the development of efficient cryptographic protocols, rather than focusing on core connections to computer science theory.

Learning objectives

By the end of the course, students should be able to:

• Develop formal security definitions for intuitive, desirable security properties.
• Formally prove security for protocols relative to formal security definitions.

Texts and references

No required textbook; relevant readings will be posted. Students may want to consult the following as supplemental learning material or background:

• Introduction to Modern Cryptography, Jonathan Katz and Yehuda Lindell
• A Pragmatic Introduction to Secure Multi-Party Computation, David Evans, Vladimir Kolesnikov, and Mike Rosulek
• The Joy of Cryptography, Mike Rosulek
• Handbook of Applied Cryptography, Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot, and Scott A. Vanstone
• The Foundations of Cryptography, Oded Goldreich

Another very useful source of reference material is scribe notes for cryptography courses, a good list of which can be found here.

Grading

Assignments

Problem sets

There will be 4 problem sets assigned throughout the semester. We ask students to submit their answers in the form of a LaTeX-generated PDF.

Final project

For the course project, you will be doing independent work to understand and explore an area in cryptography. Your deliverable with be a recorded presentation of your findings. Your goal hould be to understand a new concept in crypto by reading original sources, and then to communicate this concept clearly and concisely. You should aim to cover a topic from your own perspective, not just to summarize a single paper. Your target audience should be your fellow students in the course. If you would like to do some original research as part of your project, this is very much encouraged, but not required.

For additional information, see the project page.

Final exam

The final exam will be comprehensive and will take place during the assigned time during finals period. Please consult the finals calendar for the time when it is posted.

Course policies and academic accommodations

We will follow the standard University of Maryland graduate course policies. If you are eligible for and requesting reasonable academic accommodations due to a disability, please provide an electronic letter of accommodation via Accessibility and Disability Service within the first two weeks of the course. If you need additional accommodation, please reach out to me directly.

If you plan to observe any holidays during the semester that are not listed on the university calendar, please provide a list of these dates by the end of the first two weeks of the semester.

Schedule

Meetings are Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:30–10:45 a.m., Sept 1 through Dec 10. The schedule is subject to change; changes will be announced on the course site.