| Professor Kenneth A. Ribet |
| email: |
| Telephone: (510) 642-0648 |
| Fax: (510) 642-8204 |
| Office hours (885 Evans Hall) |
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This seminar concerns cryptography, a very interesting subject that we will study this coming semester. I led a similar seminar five semesters ago. Some students in my number theory course last fall suggested that we have another go, and now here we are.
I consulted with some cryptographer friends and asked for textbook recommendations. I settled on the third edition of Cryptography, theory and practice by Douglas R. Stinson. You can buy the book for $65.04, with free shipping, from Amazon; it should also be available in the campus bookstore.
A key aspect of this seminar is that the lectures will be given by students. One of the goals of the class is for students to learn now to present mathematics to a group. The class will meet 15 times, as shown on the table below. The aim is to have an enrollment of 15 students, with each student lecturing once. If you are on the waitlist, you might want to check this course's enrollment status.
| Date | Speaker | Title | Reading | Exercises |
| August 29 | Sarah Brodsky | Classical cryptography | Chapter 1 | 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.10, 1.11, 1.12, 1.13, 1.14, 1.23 |
| September 5 | Anna Fuller | Some concepts due to Claude Shannon | §§ 2.1-2.5 and also § 2.7 | 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.10, 2.11, 2.12 (to do the last three, you'll need to read §2.4) |
| September 12 | Ethan Rahn | Block ciphers, AES, DES | § 2.7, Chapter 3 | 3.1, 3.2, 3.5 (but only do rounds 0-8) |
| September 19 | Jimmy Yang | Hash functions | Chapter 4, §§ 1-3 | 4.3, 4.5, 4.6, 4.9a |
| September 26 | Michael Leong | RSA | Chapter 5 | 5.9, 5.10, 5.15, 5.24, 5.25, 5.27, 5.29 (all due on October 10) |
| October 3 | Alex Kaiser | |||
| October 10 | Yvonne Kemper | ElGamal, discrete logarithms | Chapter 6, §§ 1-5 | 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.7 |
| October 17 | Evelyn Crofts | Elliptic curves, theory and practice | § 6.5 | 6.13, 6.14, 6.15, 6.16a |
| October 24 | Michael Hubbard | More on discrete logs, ElGamal; input from elliptic curves | Relevant parts of Chapter 6 | 6.17, 6.18, 6.19 |
| October 31 | Jason Klein | Signature schemes | Chapter 7 | 7.1, 7.12, 7.14 |
| November 7, November 14 | Helen Tseng | Pseudo-random number generation | Chapter 8 | Due November 21 at the very latest: 8.1, 8.3, 8.6a, 8.7 |
| November 21, the day before Thanksgiving | H. Tseng, J. Yang | Something fun involving zero-knowledge proofs | No assigned reading | No assigned problems |
| November 28 | Sage Briscoe | Elliptic curve factoring algorithm | Sage's handout | Problems in Sage's handout |
| December 5 | John Brooks-Jung | Key distribution | Chapter 10 |
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