308-547 Cryptography and Data Security

Instructor: Prof. Claude Crépeau

Objectives: Discover how Alice may send a secret message to Bob that nobody else can understand, how he may be certain that this message came from Alice, how she can prove him a theorem with revealing anyhting about the proof (!), how they can flip a coin over the phone, how they can play a fair game of poker over the phone, how they can decide if their are a match without disclosing they selection criteria to each other, and how other similar security tasks may be achieved using cryptography.

Course outline:

• Introduction; basic concepts of cryptography;
• Simple cryptographic systems ; One-time-pad, ENIGMA, DES, AES, elements of cryptanalysis.
• Information theory, Unicity distance.
• Secret Sharing Schemes.
• Authentification Codes.
• Basic number theory ; public key-exchange ; Diffie-Helmann system.
• Public-Key Cryptography; RSA, ElGamal, and others.
• Signature schemes; RSA, Rabin, ElGamal, DSS and others.
• Cryptographic Hash Functions; MD4, MD5 and others.
• Elliptic curve cryptography.
• Pseudo-random number generators ; Blum-Goldwasser cryptosystem.
• Identification, Bit Commitment, Zero-Knowledge proofs, Oblivious Transfer
• Introduction to Quantum Cryptography.

Evaluation:
There will be 6 homework assigments worth 60% of your final grade and a final exman worth 40%.

Office Hours: Wednesday 9h00 - 12h00.

Office:
Room 109, McConnell Eng. Building
3480 University Street
phone: (514) 398-4716
email: crepeau@cs.mcgill.ca