Welcome to the Fall 2022 web page for CS/ECE407: Cryptography

Course Overview.

Instructor: Dakshita Khurana, dakshita@illinois.edu. Office hours: Wednesday 5 pm - 6 pm in ECE 2013 and Friday 2 pm - 3 pm in SC 4308. Alternatively, please email me to set up an appointment.
TAs: James Hulett, jhulett2@illinois.edu, Amit Agarwal, amita2@illinois.edu. James' office hours: Mondays, 11 am - 12 pm, in Siebel 4124.

Course Credits: 3/4
Time: MWF, 4.00 - 4.50 pm.
Location: ECE Building, room 2013.
Piazza: Please sign up for Piazza at piazza.com/illinois/fall2022/c93b, access code 407 to access class discussions and homework.

Note: Students are encouraged to drop by during office hours (or set up, by email, an appointment to meet) within the first 2 weeks. This will help me learn more about your interests and what you hope to learn from this class. I can also help you with a choice of topic for your project.

Students will be asked to scribe lecture notes. These notes will serve as a key resource for this course. We will closely follow the book:

• A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography
• An Introduction to Modern Cryptography

Additional Resources: Books/Lecture Notes.

• The Foundations of Cryptography, by Oded Goldreich
• Lecture Notes on Cryptography, by Bellare and Goldwasser
• Foundations of Cryptography, by Rafail Ostrovsky
• A Course In Cryptography, by Pass and Shelat
• Lecture Notes, by Boaz Barak
• Lecture Notes, by Daniel Wichs

Grading.

10%: Participation. 
This course is an in-person class. The material will be taught in class and no lecture recordings will be made available. It may be possible to make exceptions for specific students if they reach out in advance about extenuating circumstances. Students should plan on attending lectures in person to understand the material. The class intends to encourage deep, careful thought. I want the lectures be as interactive as possible: you are strongly encouraged to ask questions and offer answers. I will end lectures with open questions that we will answer interactively during the next class. These questions will be easy to answer if you attend every lecture. Reading the prescribed scribe notes and book before the next lecture is recommended to better understand the contents of the course. Finding bugs in scribe notes (and proposing fixes) will earn you participation points. In addition, students that ask insightful questions and offer insightful answers in class, or as part of assignment solutions, or on Piazza will be rewarded with extra credit.

10%: Scribe Notes.
Scribe notes are a complete, polished write-up of a lecture, with references and technical details carefully filled in. These will serve as the primary technical material for this course. Every student should expect to scribe once, typically solo, sometimes in teams of 2 depending on class size. At the beginning of every lecture, I will ask for volunteers to write the scribe notes for the day. Please do not volunteer if there is a chance that you will drop the course before you submit your scribe notes. Preparing these notes will help you internalize the material at a new level, by thinking through the significance of the material and converting every proof outline discussed in class to a rigorous proof. Please typeset your scribe notes in LaTeX using the template here. Please make a new editable copy of the file on overleaf and make changes there. You have one week to prepare the scribe notes. More precisely, the scribe notes for a Monday lecture are due at 11.59 pm the following Monday, the scribe notes for a Wednesday lecture are due at 11.59 pm the following Wednesday, and notes for a Friday lecture are due at 11.59 pm the following Friday. To submit, please turn on link sharing on overleaf (see instructions) and post the link on piazza in a private piazza post (visible to instructors and TAs), 

50%: Homeworks.
There will be 6 homework assignments, each worth 10%. You will be graded according to the total of your top 5 submissions. Topics will range from cryptanalytic attacks, to implementations of secure cryptographic primitives, and a majority will pertain to writing and understanding mathematically rigorous proofs of security. Homework assignments will be released every alternate Friday, and will be due in 10 days, i.e. on Monday at 1 pm.

30%: Exam (Take-home). 
There will one final take-home exam, with 4-5 questions, that you will have 24 hours to solve. To be successful in the exam, I highly recommend that you attend class, participate and ask questions, and give careful and deep thought to topics discussed in class. 

(ONLY FOR 4 CREDITS) 25% (out of 125%): Project.
The purpose of the project is to expose students to research in cryptography. You can pick a project topic of your choice (you can refer to this list for some nice ideas). The project can be a literature survey, or an attempt at original research to answer an open problem in cryptography. I am happy to consult individually with you during office hours or by appointment to provide guidance. You should feel free to work individually, or (recommended) in teams of 2-3, and spend at 2-3 weeks on the project. Please find the project template here.

Course Schedule.

This is a tentative schedule and is subject to change. Please keep checking this page for updates to topics and for scribe notes. Much of the content has been borrowed from the Boneh-Shoup textbook and Dan Boneh's course. Please refer to a previous offering of this course, including lecture notes and other material, here.