CS 6973, Special Problems: Applied Cryptography

Instructor

Shouhuai Xu

What's New?

• (updated Nov. 10) The schedule has been finalized. It is encouraged that you turn in your Final Report on Dec. 2, and you may turn in your revisited Final Report on Dec. 11. Please be advised that each team member must write and present her/his Final Report independently.
• (updated Sept. 25) I will be out of town in the two weeks of Oct. 28 and Nov. 4, so we will make some special arrangement as a make-up for the corresponding classes.
• We will make a special schedule for the proposal presentation, which will substitute the two classes for the week of Oct. 28. The substitution will be in the meeting room of the Department and in early Oct.
• We will make a special schedule to substitute the two classes for the week of Nov. 4. It will be in the meeting room of the Department, and in some time before the mid of Nov.
• (updated Sept. 18) When is the proposal due?
• FIRM deadline: collected at the beginning of the lecture on Oct. 2
• You can hand in your proposal earlier than the deadline, of course, as long as you have finished. Indeed, this may be on your behalf particularly if you want to discuss with me on your project.
• (updated Sept. 18) How should I prepare a proposal?
• If possible, use Latex.
• The proposal should be no more than 2 pages excluding a cover page and the bibliography.
• The cover papge should include a title, author's name and email add., name of the other team member (if any). Besides, it MUST contain a signed statement: I hereby certify that I wrote this proposal independently. That is, you must write your own proposal even if the idea(s) may be based on discussions with your teammate.
• The main body of the no-more-than-2-page proposal may look like this:
1. Backgroud (of the topic you plan to work on)
2. State of the art (i.e., what have been done)
3. The problem (you want to solve)
4. Expected contributions

Office

Science Building 4.01.46

Office hour

By appointment only. Please drop me an email with multiple time slots, from which I will pick up one to meet with you.

When, at where

Theusday & Thursday, 7:00 -- 8:15 PM, Engineering Building 2.04.02

Course objectives

• This is a research-oriented course. You will be introduced into several cutting-edge research areas, so that you can get a feeling of the state-of-the-art in those areas.
• Through a project's problem identification, proposal, design and analysis and implementation, and final report writing, you will get a feeling of doing research in those fields.
• Some, or many, of the projects will result in publishable stuff.

Grading policy

• Project proposal (20%)
• Project proposal presentation (10%)
• Final project report (50%)
• Final project presentation (10%)
• Attendance (10%)

How it works?

• Encourage collaboration
• You form a project group such that 0 < project group size < 3, unless you convince me that 3 people are necessary for the proposed project.
• In the case of group size greater than 1, you must write & present your own proposal and final report, although the content is based on the discussion with your teammate.
• I will be happy to be involved in identifying the problem, shaping the approach, and designing the targeted cryptographic schemes.

Course schedule (tentative, subject to change)

[Special acknowledgments: The lectures will adopt many materials, in one way or another, from many colleagues in the research community. I will acknowledge them on the first slide of each lecture by pointing to the appropriate source, if available. Many thanks, folks!]

1. Aug. 26, Overview of the Course + Foundations of Modern Cryptography (warm-up)
2. Aug. 28, P vs. NP (warm-up)
3. Sept. 2, Block Ciphers
4. Sept. 4, Hash Functions
5. Sept. 9, Message Authentication Schemes
6. Sept. 11, Digital Signature Schemes
7. Sept. 16, The RSA Cryptosystem
8. Sept. 18, What Cryptography Can and Cannot Do?
9. Sept. 23, Anti-Spam (I)
10. Sept. 25, Anti-Spam (II)
11. Sept. 30, Anti-DDOS (I)
12. Oct. 2, Anti-DDOS (II) (proposal due)
13. Oct. 7, Anti-DDOS (III)
14. Oct. 9, Certified Email
15. Oct. 14, Securing Passwords
16. Oct. 16, AI-based Security
17. Oct. 21, Project Progress Presentation (per group)
18. Oct. 23, Securing Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
19. Oct. 28, (special schedule; see remark above)
20. Oct. 30, (special schedule; see remark above)
21. Nov. 4, (special schedule; see remark above)
22. Nov. 6, (special schedule; see remark above)
23. Nov. 11, Project Progress Presentation (per group)
24. Nov. 13, Running Unreliable Code
25. Nov. 18, Location Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing
26. Nov. 20, Virus
27. Nov. 25, Malicious Use of Cryptography
28. Nov. 27, Thanksgiving (no class, and enjoy)
29. Dec. 2, Worm (You may turn in your final report at the beginning of the class)
30. Dec. 4, No class
31. Dec. 9, No class
32. Dec. 11, Final Presentation (You may turn in your revisited final report at the beginning of the presentation)

Useful stuff (more are coming ...)

ePrint of International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR)
Shafi Goldwasser and Mihir Bellare's Lecture Notes on Cryptography
Oded Goldreich's Foundations of Cryptography
Handbook of Cryptography
Bruce Schenier's Applied Cryptography