Syllabus

Overview

This is a one-semester graduate seminar. Topics will vary from year to year, but will focus on applied cryptography and cryptographic engineering, including: communication protocol design and analysis, cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based protocols, digital signatures, anonymous communication, cryptographic backdoors, and other topics.

Emphasis in this course is on understanding how cryptographic issues impact real systems, while maintaining an appreciation for grounding the work in fundamental science. In this course we will focus heavily on security proofs. The course will consist of in-class workshops and interactive discussions. There will be programming assignments and a course project. Students will also be expected to read assigned papers and to present at least one research paper and lead a discussion on it.

• MW 12:00 - 1:15 p.m.
• Location: Latrobe 120
• Link to Paper Repository
• Link to the ACRAB Paper website

Grading

• 35% Presentations
• 50% Course Final Project
• 15% Participation

Calendar (TBD)

• August 29: Introduction, logistics, paper selection (Matt lectures on SAT solvers and attacks)

  • Presentation slides
  • Paper

• September 4: Gabe Kaptchuk,

  • Fairplay: https://www.cs.huji.ac.il/project/Fairplay/Fairplay/Fairplay.pdf
  • Fairplay MP: https://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~noam/FairplayMP.pdf

• September 9: Tushar Jois

  • Honeybadger MPC and AynchroMix: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/883

• September 11: Discussion of MPC protocols (previous two lectures)

• September 16: Gabrielle Beck, Authenticated Garbling

• September 18: Discussion of Authenticated Garbling paper

• September 23: Max Zinkus, Mobile Private Contact Discovery at Scale

• October 14: Daniel Hwang (TBD)

• October 21: Sunitha Narayan (TBD)

• October 28: Anuraag Baishya (TBD)

• November 4: Tiger Gao (TBD)

• November 11: Lionel Eisenberg (TBD)

• November 18: Howy Ho (TBD)