06-20008 Cryptography The University of Birmingham

Autumn Semester 2011 School of Computer Science

Volker Sorge 27 September, 2011

Handout 0
General Information

Staff
Teaching Assistant
Dr Volker Sorge
Ms Katrina Samperi
Office: 207
Office: 117
Tel: 43746
Tel: 43707
Email: V.Sorge@cs.bham.ac.uk
Email: K.Samperi@cs.bham.ac.uk
Office hours: Monday, 9–10am
Please email to make an appointment
URL: www.cs.bham.ac.uk/∼vxs
URL: www.cs.bham.ac.uk/∼kxs401

Lectures
Tuesdays, 2pm–3pm, Learning Centre UG05 (Building R28 on the Campus Map)
Friday, 11am–12pm, Biosciences E102 (Building R27 on the Campus Map)

Exercises
Friday, 2pm–3pm, Biosciences E102, (Building R27 on the Campus Map)
There will be a regular class in the first week of term on Friday, 30th September instead of an exercise
class.

Handouts
... will be provided (normally) on a weekly basis. Sources for all handouts (in PDF format) will be kept
on the webpage.
Spare copies are kept in the School Library.
The handouts will come in three parts: General lecture notes, Mathematical topics, and a Glossary. The
latter two are intended for looking things up when going through the lecture notes.

Assessment
... is in two parts:
Exam: 80% of your course mark will be determined by a 1.5-hour examination in May (or early June).
Continuous Assessment:20% of the mark is determined by continuous assessment.
Most handouts will contain an exercise section together with a deadline for handing in the solutions
(usually every week). Each exercise is worth a certain number of points. The total number of points
throughout the term will add up to 120% of marks. However, maximally 100% of marks can be counted
for he assessment mark, and every mark above 100% will be capped at 100%.
Homework must be handed in through one of the departmental pigeon holes on the Ground Floor (next to
the General Office) by the given deadline. Late submissions will not be accepted because I will provide
model answers to all exercises. Exercises are of a style similar to those appearing in the May examination
and they will be discussed in the exercise classes.
However, I will throw in the occasional programming exercise. Programming exercises can be done
in a programming language of your choice, provided that it is available under Linux on the School
computers. Solutions to programming exercises consist of the (commented) code, brief instructions how

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to run it, and solutions to the questions posed in the exercises. Instructions how exactly to hand in
programming exercises will be given later.

Policy on plagiarism:
As preparation for the May exam I recommend that you attempt the exercises individually, but you
may still find it helpful to discuss the assignments with others. In any case, work submitted must be
formulated by yourself. If I find evidence of plagiarism then I will award zero marks without prior
warning, irrespective of whether you copied from others or whether your work was copied by others.
More serious cases will be dealt with according to the School’s policy on plagiarism, a copy of which is
kept at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/resources/studentinfo/plagiarism.htm

Anonymous marking and Data Protection Act:

We are required to mark anonymously wherever possible. There is no reason why I should not follow
this rule for the exercises in this course. Please note, however, that this means that you always have
to write your registration number on your submitted work. Since lecturing staff are not allowed to
see lists which contain both name and registration number of students I cannot infer your registration
number from your name. Scripts which do not contain the registration number will have to be ignored.
Scripts with both registration number and name can not be returned!

Resits
There is one resit opportunity for this course in September 2011 for students that are eligible. Please
consult http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/internal/modules/resit.html for eligibility cri-
teria.

Textbooks
It is not necessary for you to buy a textbook for this course as the handouts should be sufficiently detailed
for revision and self-study. Some students, however, do like to see the material explained by another au-
thor and this can help to understand the more difficult parts. You can examine some of these textbooks
in the Central Library and the School Library.

Texts accompanying the lecture:

Fergueson, Schneier: Practical Cryptography. John Wiley & Sons, 2003.
Schneier: Applied Cryptography. John Wiley & Sons, 1996. Second edition.
Menezes, Oorschot, Vanstone: Handbook of Applied Cryptography, CRC Press, 1996.
http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/
Smart: Cryptography: An Introduction. McGraw Hill, 2003.
[The book is no longer in print, but you can download a newer edition at:
http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/∼nigel/Crypto Book/book.ps]

A book on programming:
Hook: Beginning Cryptography with Java. John Wiley & Sons, 2005.

Web page
There is additional information about the syllabus and textbooks on the web page at
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/∼vxs/teaching/crypt/

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Tentative Syllabus
• Overview on Historical Ciphers

• Symmetric Ciphers

– Block Ciphers
∗ DES (Feistel)
∗ AES (RIJNDAEL)
∗ Cryptomeria, AACS
– Stream Ciphers
∗ Pseudo-random generators/functions
∗ LFSR
∗ RC4, CSS
– Key Exchange and Management
∗ Diffie-Hellman-Merkle, Needham-Schroeder
– Cryptographic Hash Functions
∗ Merkle-Damgård
∗ MD4, MD5, SHA-1
– Message Authetication Codes

• Asymmetric Ciphers

– Public Key Cryptography

– ElGamal, Cramer Shoup
– Diffie-Hellman, RSA

• Digital Signatures

– Schnorr Signatures, DSA

• Certificates

– VeriSign, PGP

• Commitment Schemes, Zero Knowledge Proofs

• Quantum Cryptography
(A guest lecture by Steven Vickers)

Some of the Mathematical topics we will touch on:

• Permutations

• Modular Arithmetic and Residue Classes

• Finite Fields

• Matrix Arithmetic

• Discrete Logarithm and Subgroups

• Arithmetic Modulo a Composite ;