ECS 227 - Course Information - Fall 2003

Meetings

Our course meets Wednesdays from 6:10-9:00 pm in 1134 Bainer. There are ten three-hour lectures. Please do not miss lectures. If you do miss a lecture, video tapes are available from Fall 2001, but the contents may or may not be a close match. When you are in class, try to think.

I would like to reschedule one class meeting: the Wednesday before Thanksgiving (Nov 26) I would like to move to the Monday of that week (Nov 24). Making this change requires class consent. If you object to the change, please see me or send me email this week. Assuming I don't hear from anybody objecting to this change, I'll circulate a list next week for you to sign, authorizing the rescheduling of the class.

Office Hours

My office is 3063 Kemper (formerly Eng II). Office hours are by appointment, or by no appointment: if you drop by and I'm not too busy, I'll talk with you. (In the past I set official hours for this course, but nobody ever seemed to come at the scheduled times, so I'll abandon that unless there is demand.)

Course Webpage

Most everything will be collected on-line. Go to my homepage at www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway and follow the classes link to the ECS 227 - Modern Cryptography - Fall 2003 web page.

Material

I expect to lecture on some or all of the following topics: introduction - symmetric encryption - block ciphers - pseudorandom permutations and pseudorandom functions - one-way functions - pseudorandom generators - symmetric encryption - hash functions - message authentication - authenticated encryption - asymmetric encryption - digital signatures - authenticated key exchange - interactive proofs - zero knowledge. Course material is subject to change depending on how fast (or slow) I go, and depending on student interests. You should communicate with me about what you are interested in.

Prerequisites

You need to have some mathematical maturity to take this class; most especially, you need to be able to understand what is (and what is not) a mathematically meaningful definition. Though we don't use a lot of tools, we sometimes use rather subtle definitions and proofs. Courses like ECS 222A (Algorithm) and ECS 120 (Theory of Computation) are good for building up the necessary maturity and should be taken as nominal prerequisites. Graduate standing in mathematics is a fine substitute, though you may wish you had heard of things like "Turing machines" before. It is the student's responsibility to make sure s/he is not "in too deep". I would say that this course is appropriate to first-year grad students with a good background, with an interest and some ability in theory; but it might not be appropriate to a first-year student with minimal math skill or theory background.

Class notes

There is no assigned text, and no reasonable text is currently available for the material of this course. Evolving course notes can be found on-line, as well as some supplemental papers.

If you're interested to have an actual, finished book, the most useful may be that of [Menezes, van Oorschot, Vanstone], which is available on-line, for free. There is also a new book by [Goldreich] which gives a much more scientific treatment of cryptography, but the scope is very limited and the treatment will be quite different from ours.

Homeworks

There will be occasional homework assignments. Homeworks should be typeset in LaTeX. Late homeworks will not be accepted. You may not consult any old homework solutions in preparing your homework. Acknowledge the source of any ideas, whether it be a book, paper, colleague, or apple tree.

You may share ideas with someone else as long as you acknowledge them. If you work with one or more person closely then you should turn in a single writeup. I myself believe that working closely with other students tends to lead to an inferior understanding of course material, but I don't forbid it, both because it is impractical and because some students honestly believe that they learn more working with a friend.

Projects

You must read a paper in the provable-security tradition of cryptography, understand it, and then write something about it. Alternatively, you must do some small research project of your own: anything novel that touches on provable-security cryptography. Projects are due the last day of class. Writeups need not be long; about 2-4 pages should do. But they should be beautiful: meticulously written, nicely typeset (LaTeX, please), and preferably with some interesting or semi-interesting idea.

If you have any doubt if your envisioned paper/project is OK, talk to me, and do so more than two weeks before the project is due. If you are reading a research paper, going with one of mine or Mihir Bellare makes a particularly safe choice, but this is certainly not required.

I won't discuss the projects in class. You're on your own to remember that you have to do this, and to budget your time appropriately.

Exams

There's no midterm, but there's a sort-of final. I prefer to call it a "discussion". You'll come in to my office for 20-30 minutes, we'll talk, and I'll try to ascertain how much you got out of the class. Don't be worried about it; it ain't a big deal. But it helps me understand what students are and are not understanding, and what they are and are not interested in.

Grading

I am required to give grades, which will be based on what has already been mentioned: homeworks, your project, our final discussion, and attendance. This is a non-required graduate class, so I expect students to be here because they're genuinely interested in learning the material.

Research in cryptography

You may treat this class as your "invitation" for doing research in cryptography, a most unusual and wonderful subject. Welcome!
Phil Rogaway's homepage