Cryptology I (Autumn 2010)

Time and location

Event	Time	Location
Lectures	Mon 12:15 - 15:45	Liivi 2-404	Peeter Laud
Practice sessions	Thu 8:15 - 11:45	Liivi 2-402	Bingsheng Zhang
(weeks 1—8)
Mid-term test	September 30th, 8-10	Liivi 2-405
End-of-term test	November 8th, 12-...	Liivi 2-404
Exam (second attempt)	January 10th, 9:00 - ...	Liivi 2-404

Grading is based on a number of take-home exercises during the course (making up half of the grade), a test in the middle of the course (making up a quarter of the grade) and an examination paper sometime after the lectures have ended (making up a quarter of the grade). There will be an option to repeat both the test and the final exam during the regular exam session.

• The examination paper will contain questions that are less suitable for take-home exercises.
• The exam is open-book. I will also allow laptops but please do not use them to communicate with the outside world.

The contents of the lectures is similar to the previous years. Notes (in Estonian) covering parts of the lectures can be found here. The coverage of the material in the lectures is mostly based on Doug Stinson's textbook, and a little bit on Arto Salomaa's textbook.

News:

• Oct 17th: The end-of-the-term test will take place on November 8th, at the time where the lectures used to be, instead of the lecture in the Cryptographic Protocols course.
• Oct 8th: BTW, these were the exercises in the last year's end-of-the-term test.
• Oct 5th: Bingsheng will be away from Tartu from October 14th to October 25th. Hence he will hold a practice session also on October 11th. The last three meetings of the class will be with me. Of those, the Thursdays will be more lecture-like and Monday will be more similar to a practice session.
• Sep 22nd: The mid-term test will take place on Thursday, September 30th, during the first half of the practice session. The test covers topics from the start of the course up to RSA (excluded). These were the last year's midterm exercises and these were the exercises from the second try of both the mid-term and the end-of-the-term test.
• Sep 8th: My laptop's hard disk is making very frightening noises. Until I get that fixed, I may be less responsive than usual. OK, I got that fixed.
• Sep 8th: Bingsheng is not in Estonia on September 9th. I will give a lecture instead.
• Aug 25th: There are no lectures on Monday, August 30th. The practice session in Thursday, September 2nd, will take place, though. It will give some mathematical preliminaries for the course.

Bingsheng Zhang is maintaining a page for the practice sessions.

Slides of the lectures:

• September 6th
  • Some tools are available to aid the bookkeeping in breaking the substitution cipher or the Vigenère cipher.
• The lecture on September 9th will be based on these (first 23 slides) and these (first 15 slides) slides.
• On September 13th, we will actually cover block ciphers and then continue with stream ciphers and linear feedback shift registers.
• On September 20th, we finish LFSR-s. Then we start with asymmetric ciphers (but we will not explore the cryptanalysis of the knapsack cipher). We will then delve into RSA.
• On September 27th, we continue with RSA. We will not start the next topic after that. We may do some exercises inbetween.
• On October 4th, we speak about cryptosystems based on the hardness of discrete logarithms and then continue with signatures and hash functions.
• We did not start with signatures on October 4th. But we will on October 14th.
• On October 18th, we continue with the construction of hash functions. We try to do as many exercises as possible.
• We finish the course on October 21st, talking about identification protocols and trying to understand the notion of zero-knowledge.