CSC 281 Introduction to Cryptology: Notes

This page contains some text notes related to the lectures. These are basically my notes to myself, and are consequently NOT a complete summary of the material presented in class, much of which comes from inside my head, cued by these reminders. Keeping this in mind, you may find the outlines below useful.

WARNING!!! If you rely on this material as a substitute for coming to class, you will likely do poorly in the course. It is incomplete as stated above. Also you will miss out on the benefit of class discussion, questions you may not have thought of but someone else did, osmosis, ambience, being bored by the prof, etc. etc. There is this perverse fact, noted not just by me, that the better the web notes for a course, the worse the overall class performance often is. The only reason I can think of is that the presence of good lecture summaries encourages certain students to skip boring lectures, confident that they won't miss any material, but in the process missing a bunch of intangibles that, in fact, facilitate mastery of knowledge...
Probably this means we all have just not figured out how to optimally use the web for college education. In the meantime, beware the apparently easy path.

• Lecture notes 1: August 30, 2018

  Introduction, terminology, modulo arithmetic, simple ciphers.
  
  

• Lecture notes 2: Sept 4-6, 2018

  Attacks on simple ciphers (Caesar, affine, substitution), simple concepts from probability and statistics.
  
  

• Lecture notes 3: Sept 11, 2018

  Anagrams and transposition ciphers, intro to mathematics of permutations, shuffles and block interleaves.
  
  

• Lecture notes 4: Sept 13 2018

  Polyalphabetic substitution, Vignere cipher, Kasiski, Friedman attacks.
  
  

• Lecture notes 5: Sept 21-26, 2017

  More statistics, Hill cipher and attacks.
  
  

• Lecture notes 6: Sept 28, 2017

  Rotor machines, German enigma, attacks
  
  

• Lecture notes 7: Oct 3-5, 2017

  More math. Integers mod m, discrete logs; complexity
  
  

• Lecture notes 8: Oct 5, 2017

  Steganography
  
  

• Lecture notes 9: Oct 12, 20017

  DES
  
  

• Lecture notes 10: Oct 17-19, 2017

  Miscellaneous number theory: Prime numbers, Fermat's little theorem, factoring Mersenne numbers, fast exponentiation mod n, square roots mod p, Sun Ze's theorem, square roots mod composites.
  
  

• Lecture notes 11: Oct 24-26, 2017

  Public key systems: Probabilistic primality testing, Diffie Hellman key exchange, RSA cipher.
  
  

• Lecture notes 12: (Oct 26), 2017

  Introduction to group theory.
  
  

  Lecture notes 13: Nov 2, 2017

  Introduction to cryptographic protocols.
  
  

  Lecture notes 14: Nov 7, 2017

  Digital signatures and key exchange protocols.
  
  

  Lecture notes 15: Nov 14, 2017

  Authentication.
  
  

  Lecture notes 16:

  Multiple keys, secret splitting, sharing; Timestamping; Bit commitment, fair coin flips.
  
  

  Lecture notes 17:

  Zero knowledge proofs; Quantum cryptographyy.
  
  

  Lecture notes 18:

  Pseudo random number generators, stream ciphers; rings, fields.
  
  

  Lecture notes 19:

  Miscellaneous legal issues.
  
  

  Lecture notes 20: /H3> Bar codes.
  
  

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