CS 6973, Special Problems: Applied Cryptography

Instructor

Shouhuai Xu

What's New?

• (Oct. 21) special arrangements for the classes during my out-of-town
  

Office

Science Building 4.01.46

Office hour

MW 7-8PM

When, at where

MW 8:30 -- 9:45 PM, HSS 3.03.14

Course objectives

• This is a research-oriented course. The students will be introduced into several cutting-edge research areas, so that they can get a feeling of the state-of-the-art in those areas. This year 's emphsizes include (some of) the following topics: secure knowledge management, securing peer-to-peer networks, securing mobile ad hoc networks and sensor networks, countering malware such as worms, and possibly some other topics of special interest. All these topics have cryptographic relevance, and are far more challenging than simple-minded cryptographic design.
  
• 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 of the projects may lead to publishable stuff.

Grading policy

• Project proposal (20%)
• Project proposal presentation (10%)
• Final project report (40%)
• Final project presentation (with demo, if applicable) (20%)
• Attendance (10%)

How it works?

• I'll make available on this webpage a list of papers, which fall into the topics mentioned above, you may select one of the topics as your project work. Also, you are encouraged to select your topic which you are most interested in; in this case, you need to convince me the security/cryptography relevance of your topic.
  
• 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.

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
• You must give sufficient credit to appropriate references (if applicable).
  

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. 24, Overview of the Course
2. Aug. 29, P vs. NP (warm-up)
3. Aug. 31, History and Foundations of Modern Cryptography
   
4. Sept. 5, Labor Day Holiday (no class)
   
5. Sept. 7, Block Ciphers
6. Sept. 12, Hash Functions (including the recent breaking news on hash function)
7. Sept. 14, Digital Signature Schemes
8. Sept. 19, Special arrangement: Today's lecture is substituted by Invited Talk at 7:30pm Sept. 19 Main Building, Room 0.106. Notice that before this talk, there is another talk on September 19, 2005, 1:00PM – 2:00PM in the CS conference room, and yet another talk on September 20, 2005, 2:00PM – 3:00PM, BS Building, Loeffler Room 3.03.02.
   
9. Sept. 21, The RSA Cryptosystem
10. Sept. 26, Project proposal due and presentation (out of town; rescheduled to Oct.3)
    
11. Sept. 28, Message Authentication Schemes
12. Oct. 3, Trusted Computing (The two merged lectures take place in the CS Conference Room at 7:00PM-10PM; you need to hand in and present your proposal)
    
13. Oct. 5, Bettering HCI for Security and Privacy
    
14. Oct. 10, Securing MANETs and Sensor Networks I
15. Oct. 12, Securing MANETs and Sensor Networks II
    
16. Oct. 17, Securing MANETs and Sensor Networks III (special arrangement: today's lecture is to be substituted by Invited Talk on Oct. 18, 2pm, room number TBA)
    
17. Oct. 19, Countering Worm I
    
18. Oct. 24, Countering Worm II
    
19. Oct. 26, Countering Worm III
    
20. Oct. 31, Countering-Countering Worm IV
    
21. Nov. 2, On the security of group communication schemes based on symmetric key cryptosystems
    
22. Nov. 7, Secure Knowledge Management I (out of town; rescheduled to Oct. 28, 6:00pm-7:15pm in the CS conference room)
23. Nov. 9, Secure Knowledge Management II (out of twon; rescheduled to Oct. 28, 7:16pm-8:30pm in the CS conference room)
    
24. Nov. 14, Policy-driven access control with mixed credentials (class meet in the CS conference room at 7:00pm)
    
25. Nov. 16, Mapping Internet Sensors with Probe Response Attacks (out of town; rescheduled to Nov. 14, 8:16pm-9:30pm in the CS conference room)
    
26. Nov. 21, RFID Security and Privacy I
    
27. Nov. 23, RFID Security and Privacy II
    
28. Nov. 28, Peer-to-Peer Security I
    
29. Nov. 30, Peer-to-Peer Security II
    
30. Dec. 5, No class
    
31. Dec. 7, No class
32. Dec. 12, No class
33. Dec. 13, Final Presentation (8:00pm-10:45pm)

Useful stuff

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