This mini-course was taught in 2007 at Google. It is intended to be a brief survey for a general technical audience.
Video Lectures
- Classical to Modern Cryptography
- Using Cryptography in Practice
- Security Definitions and Proofs of Security
- Verifying Elections with Cryptography. Guest Lecturer: Ben Adida.
- Crypto Strikes Back! by Nate Lawson, with blog post and slides.
Lecture Slides
- Lecture 1: From Historical to Modern Cryptography
- Lecture 2: Cryptography in Practice
- Lecture 3: Theory of Cryptography
- Lecture 4: Cryptography and Voting
Suggested Readings
- Week 1:
- “Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt”, Alma Whitten and J.D. Tygar.
An (un)usability study of PGP. - “New Directions in Cryptography”, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman.
A seminal paper in public-key cryptography. Recommended if interested in the underlying math of public-key crypto. - “A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems”, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman.
The RSA paper. Recommended if interested in the underlying math of public-key crypto.
- “Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt”, Alma Whitten and J.D. Tygar.
- Week 2:
- “Snake Oil FAQ”, Matt Curtin; “Snake Oil”, Bruce Schneier
- “Twenty Years of Attacks on the RSA Cryptosystem”, Dan Boneh
Good overview of many different attacks on RSA. Some technical details. - The HMAC Papers, The OAEP Papers, Mihir Bellare et. al.
These are technical papers and demonstrate some of the difficulty in composing crypto primitives. - “Dos and Don’ts of Client Authentication on the Web”, Kevin Fu, Emil Sit, Kendra Smith, and Nick Feamster.
A great case study in practical web authentication. Recommended for engineers. - Bleichenbacher’s RSA signature forgery
- Week 3:
- Zero Knowledge Tutorial, Oded Goldreich
This is a good introduction, but quickly gets pretty technical. - Probabilistic encryption, Goldwasser and Micali
This paper introduced the idea of semantic security
- Zero Knowledge Tutorial, Oded Goldreich
- Week 4:
- Secret Ballot Receipts: True Voter-Verifiable Election. David Chaum.
- Scratch and Vote. Ben Adida and Ron Rivest.
Exercises
More Online Courses
- Cryptography and Cryptanalysis from MIT
- Advanced Topics in Cryptography from MIT
- Practical Aspects of Modern Cryptography from the University of Washington
- Using Cryptography Correctly from Stanford University
