Topic outline

  • General

    In teaching period III, we are going to cover a security analysis of the TLS 1.3 Key Exchange using game-based analysis. Prerequisits for this part of the course are familiarity with security games and their composition: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/306 Such contents were covered in CS-E4320 - Cryptography and Data Security.

    In teaching period IV, we are going to study connections/separations between complexity theory/worst-case hardness, average-case hardness, hard learning problems and cryptography. Moreover, we are going to see the implications of the advent of indistinguishability obfuscation which was at the center of the last scientific revolution in cryptography. If you are curious on indistinguishability obfuscation, here is a very nice starting point: https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/454.pdf If you are curious about connections/separations between various types of hardness, the following two papers are nice starting points: https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0606037 and https://www.irif.fr/~dxiao/docs/ABX08.pdf For this part of the course, we assume familiarity with the notion of an algorithm and the notion of polynomial-time and NP-hardness. We recommend Oded Goldreich's book on complexity for an introduction: http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/cc-book.html Another helpful book is the complexity book by Sanjeev Arora and Boaz Barak: http://theory.cs.princeton.edu/complexity/

    The course is research-oriented and intended to provide sufficient foundations to carry out research in the corresponding areas of cryptography (analysis of real-world protocols, indistinguishability obfuscation, complexity-based cryptography). Anyone interested is welcome!