CIS 4930/6930: Privacy-Preserving and Trustworthy Cyber-Infrastructures

This course will explore emerging cyber-security technologies that will play a vital role towards addressing the security challenges of critical cyber-infrastructures. This course first covers foundational cyber-security tools such as hash-based primitives, symmetric encryption, public key encryption, broadcast authentication (digital signatures) and puzzle systems. This course then focuses on privacy enhancing technologies such as encrypted databases, searchable encryption and private information retrieval. This course also covers light-weight and delay-aware authentication techniques. This course explores the state-of-art applied cryptography research problems and solutions via literature survey and research projects. Successful students will have a good understanding of applied cryptography essentials, which will help them as a differentiating factor to obtain competitive R&D positions in industry.

Please see syllabus Undergraduate
and syllabus Graduate

The details of scheduling and course material (e.g., research papers, slides) will be provided as the course progresses. The material will be provided (generally) a few days advance. Students are strongly suggested to read research papers and slides before coming to the class. The material will be non-trivial and prior reading/familiarity will be very helpful. Homeworks, answer keys, handnotes and some slides (e.g., student slides) will be available via CANVAS. Therefore, please follow both course webpage and especially CANVAS.

Handouts (i.e., lecture slides) and reading papers will be provided during the term.  However, some optional books that may be useful, includes but are not limited to:

• Douglas R. Stinson, “Cryptography Theory and Practice, 3rd edition".

• Jonathan Katz & Yehuda Lindell , “Introduction to Modern Cryptography”.

These two are some excellent free cryptography e-books:

• Lecture notes of  Dr. Mihir Bellare: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~mihir/cse207/classnotes.html

• "The Joy Cryptography" from Dr. Mike Rosulek: http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~rosulekm/crypto/