Cryptology I (Autumn 2008)

Time and location

Event	Time	Location
Lectures	Mon 12:15 - 13:45	Liivi 2-315	Peeter Laud
	Tue 16:15 - 17:45	Liivi 2-404
Practice sessions	Tue 14:15 - 15:45	Liivi 2-404	Margus Niitsoo
	Wed 10:15 - 11:45	Liivi 2-404
(weeks 1—8)

Grading is based on a number of take-home exercises during the course (making up two thirds of the grade) and an examination paper sometime after the lectures have ended (making up one third of the grade). A good performance in practice sessions may substitute for this week's home exercises.

• The examination paper will contain questions that are less suitable for take-home exercises.
• The exam is open-book (but closed-laptop).
• The exam takes place at November 4th, 14:15-18:00 at Liivi 2-315. The second time is at January 6th, 9:15-13:00, at Liivi 2-315.

The contents of the lectures is similar to the previous years. Notes (in Estonian) covering parts of the lectures can be found here. The coverage of the material in the lectures is mostly based on Doug Stinson's textbook.

News:

• Oct 14th: Exams from the previous years: November 6th, 2007, January 15th, 2008.
• Sep 23rd: I will be away Sep 29th – Oct 2nd and then again Oct 6th – 10th. During these weeks, Margus Niitsoo will do the teaching. There will be more emphasis on exercises. However, there will be a lecture tomorrow (Sep 24th), instead of an exercise session.
• Aug 25th: There will be no lecture on the 1st of September. On the 2nd of September, we will start with four hours (14:15—17:45) of lectures. The next lectures and practice sessions will be according to the schedule.

Margus Niitsoo is maintaining a page for the practice sessions. The home exercises can be found from there, too.

Slides of the lectures:

• September 2nd
• September 8th
• On September 9th we will continue with DES. After that we will start looking at stream ciphers and LFSRs in particular.
• On September 15th we talked about LFSRs
• On September 16th we start with asymmetric cryptogrpahy. Slides are here and here. We are not going to delve into the details of breaking the knapsack cryptosystem.
• On September 22nd we continued with RSA; we'll finish it on September 23rd. After that we continue with cryptosystems based on the hardness of discrete logarithms. This will most probably occupy the rest of lecture in Sep 23rd and the whole lecture in Sep 24th.
• In the beginning of October, Margus gave lectures on signature schemes, hash functions and MACs.
• On October 13th we look at formally defining security. These slides may also be relevant here.
• On October 14th (and most probably also in the next Monday) we will take a look at the identification protocols.
• On October 21st and 22nd we continued with identification protocols.
• On October 23rd, I try to do a summary of things that we learned, trying to cover the usage of various primitives and algorithms.