Cryptology I (Autumn 2009)

Time and location

Event	Time	Location
Lectures	Mon 12:15 - 13:45	Liivi 2-404	Peeter Laud
	Tue 12:15 - 13:45	Liivi 2-403
Practice sessions	Mon 14:15 - 15:45	Liivi 2-315	Margus Niitsoo
	Wed 10:15 - 11:45	Liivi 2-405
(weeks 1—8)
Exam (second attempt)	January 11th, 9:00 - ...	Liivi 2-315

Grading is based on a number of take-home exercises during the course (making up half of the grade), a test in the middle of the course (making up a quarter of the grade) and an examination paper sometime after the lectures have ended (making up a quarter of the grade). There will be an option to repeat both the test and the final exam during the regular exam session.

• The examination paper will contain questions that are less suitable for take-home exercises.
• The exam is open-book. I will also allow laptops but please do not use them to communicate with the outside world.

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, and a little bit on Arto Salomaa's textbook.

News:

• Nov 9th: This and this where the exam tasks from the previous year. Note that they cover the whole course (unlike this year's final exam).
• Oct 19th: The second try for both the mid-term and the final exam will take place January 11th, 2010, from 9 o'clock.
• Oct 19th: The final exam will take place November 9th, 12-14, in room 404.
• Oct 10th: During the last week of the course (October 19th to 21st) I will be giving both lectures and practice sessions. Some of the practice sessions may turn out to be rather lecture-like.
• Oct 10th: I will not be in Tartu in 13th of October. Margus Niitsoo will give the lecture.
• Sep 22nd: The "mid-term" exam took place in September 29th, instead of the lecture. These were the exercises.

Margus Niitsoo is maintaining a page for the practice sessions.

Slides of the lectures:

• September 1st
  • Some tools are available to aid the bookkeeping in breaking the substitution cipher or the Vigenère cipher.
• On September 7th, we continue from where we left off.
• On September 8th, we see what it means that a cipher hides information, based on these slides from last year.
• September 14th
  • Here is a detailed, albeit unconventional description of the AES, as well as the mathematical choices that fixed the details of AES's round function.
• September 15th and probably also Sep. 21st.
• In Sep. 21st we continue with stream ciphers and also recall some basic notions of probability theory.
• September 22nd
• On September 28th, we start with RSA. We finished it in October 6th.
• On October 12th, we speak about cryptosystems based on the hardness of discrete logarithms.
• On October 13th, we start with signatures and hash functions. Continue on October 19th.
• We finish the course with identification protocols in October 20th and 21st.