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