CSCI 5440: Cryptography

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Spring 2018

Course Description

Cryptography allows us to achieve secure and private communication and computation in insecure environments. We will study various settings of interest in which these seemingly impossible objectives can be achieved (and some where they cannot). This year's version will attempt to address the gap between the theory and practice of cryptography.

Tentative schedule

date topic
1Jan 8, 9 Secret sharing and perfectly secure encryption
2Jan 15, 16 Pseudorandomness and private-key encryption
3Jan 22, 23 Pseudorandom functions and chosen plaintext attacks
4Jan 29, 30 Public-key encryption, obfuscation, DDH and LWE
5Feb 5, 6 Identification schemes
6Feb 12, 13 Authentication, signatures, hashing, random oracles
Feb 19, 20 Lunar new year
7Feb 26, 27 Two-party computation, oblivious transfer, garbled circuits
8Mar 5, 6 Commitments, zero-knowledge
9Mar 12, 13 Proofs of knowledge, fairness, multiparty computation
10Mar 19, 20, 26 Homomorphic encryption, impossibility of obfuscation
11Mar 27, Apr 3 Verification of delegated computations
Apr 2 Easter holiday
12Apr 9, 10 Distributed consensus, blockchains
13Apr 16-23 Project presentations

Homeworks and Exams

Course Information

References

Notes will be provided for every lecture. The following references cover some of the topics in more detail.