CS 60041 Cryptography and network security
Autumn 2003
L-T-P: 3-0-0, credits: 3

Class timings

Tuesday	3:30 pm -- 5:25 pm
Wednesday	1:30 pm -- 2:25 pm

Prerequisites

• Students must have undergone a course on `Discrete structures' like CS21001/17603/MA20013. During the second half of the course I will extensively use algebraic structures like monoids, groups, rings and fields.

• A course on `design and analysis of algorithms' (like CS23005/17621/MA2301) is strongly recommended. Typically, I will not require much of sophisticated data structures, but techniques of analyzing timing and space requirements of an algorithm.

Tentative syllabus (covered, not covered)

1. Basics (3 hours)

Basic objectives of cryptography, secret-key and public-key cryptography, one-way and trapdoor one-way functions, cryptanalysis, attack models.

2. Block ciphers (3 hours)

DES, multiple encryption, meet-in-the-middle attack, modes of operation.

3. Stream ciphers (3 hours)

Vernam's one-time pad, synchronous and asynchronous stream siphers, linear feedback shift registers, stream ciphers based on LFSR, insertion of non-linearity.

4. Message digest (3 hours)

Cryptographic hash functions and their desirable properties, keyed and unkeyed hash functions, MDC and MAC, Merkle's meta method, hash functions from block ciphers, custom-designed hash functions (MD and SHA families), birthday attack.

5. Public-key parameters (12 hours)

Review of discrete algebraic structures, modular arithmetic, GCD, primality testing, Chinese remainder theorem, quadratic residues, finite fields.

6. Intractable problems (4 hours)

Integer factorization problem, RSA problem, modular square root problem, discrete logarithm problem, Diffie-Hellman problem. Known algorithms for solving these intractable prolems.

7. Public-key cryptographic schemes (8 hours)

RSA encryption, Rabin encryption, ElGamal encryption. Diffie-Hellman key exchange. RSA signature, Rabin signature, ElGamal signature, DSA. Blind and undeniable signatures. Passwords, challenge-response algorithms, zero-knowledge protocols.

8. Cryptanalysis in practice (3 hours)

Side channel attacks: timing attacks, power attacks, fault attacks. Backdoor cryptanalysis.

9. Quantum computation and cryptography (4 hours)

Postulates of quantum mechanics, quantum computation, quantum key exchange, Shor's poly-time quantum algorithms for integer factorization and discrete logs.

10. Network issues (3 hours)

Certification, public-key infrastructure, secured socket layer, Kerberos.

Books

[DVM] will be followed for topics 1 and 5--12. For symmetric-key techniques look at [HAC] or [Stinson].

Test schedule

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