CS 758: Cryptography / Network Security

last updated May 4, 2012

This page contains information about the Computer Science graduate course CS 758, "Cryptography / Network Security". This course is being offered in the Spring Semester, 2012 by Doug Stinson.

Course Information

Course enrollment limit: The course enrollment limit for this course is 20 students. If you are not a CS student and you would like to take this course, please speak to me.
class time: 9:30 - 10:30 MWF
class location: DC 3313
first lecture Wednesday, May 2
instructor: Doug Stinson
office: DC 3522
email: dstinson"at"uwaterloo.ca
Note: please use University of Waterloo accounts when sending me email.
telephone: (519)-888-4567 ext. 35590
consultation: I am often available for consultation in my office without an appointment. If you wish to make an appointment, please send me email or telephone me.

Assignments

There will be (approximately) four assignments during the course. Assignments will be posted here.

Textbook

There is no assigned textbook for the course. However, if you would like a reference (other than the lecture slides), much of the course material can be found in The Third Edition of Cryptography: Theory and Practice.

Course Slides and Supplementary Information

Course slides and additional notes are available here.

Objectives

This course covers cryptographic protocols and their application to secure communication, especially in a network setting.

Prerequisites

There are no formal prerequisites. A previous course in cryptography such as C&O 487 (Applied Cryptography), or a course in security such as CS 458/658, would be helpful (but it is not essential) in providing background for the course.

This is not a mathematics course, but cryptography uses a variety of mathematical techniques, most of which are at least introduced in a typical "discrete structures" course. Background that is useful for this course includes basic complexity theory, elementary number theory, algebra, probability, and combinatorics.

Course Outline (Calendar Description)

Review of cryptographic primitives and their applications to information security, and notions of cryptographic security. Discussion of public-key encryption, secret-key encryption, message authentication, signature schemes, and hash functions (6 hours).
Techniques for entity authentication. Passwords, challenge-response, identification schemes (e.g., Fiat-Shamir, Guillou-Quisquater), general techniques for zero-knowledge proofs for NP-complete languages (6 hours).
Protocols for key establishment, transport, agreement and maintenance. Online key distibution using a trusted server (Kerberos). Public-key techniques, including a discussion of Diffie-Hellman key agreement, man-in-the-middle attacks, STS protocol and forward secrecy. Unconditionally secure key distribution, including the Blom scheme and combinatorial key distribution patterns (10 hours).
Cryptography in a multi-user setting. Secret sharing schemes (including Shamir threshold schemes and schemes for general access structures). Conference key distribution and broadcast encryption. Copyright protection techniques and tracing schemes (8 hours).
Public-key infrastructure. Models for managing public keys and certificates (X.509 certificates, certification authorities, trust models, certificate verification and revocation, etc.). Applications, including PGP, SSL and IPsec (6 hours).

Grades

The course grades will be based on written assignments (about 65% of course grade; these may require some simple Maple programming) plus a course project (about 35% of the course grade).