CSE208: Advanced Cryptography (FHE)

Daniele Micciancio

Fall 2023


If you are enrolled in the class, you should get access to piazza and gradescope automatically through canvas. Other than that, we will not make use of canvas. Homework assignments and other course material will be posted on this webpage.


Course Description

CSE208 is an advanced, graduate level course in cryptography, and assumes a solid background in cryptography, as provided, for example, by the introductory graduate cryptography course CSE207. The most important course prerequisite is a working understanding of the definitional/theoretical security framework of modern cryptography, i.e., how to rigorously formulate security requirements, and anlyze candidate cryptographic constructions with respect to them. Familiarity with a number of common cryptographic primitives, like public key encryption, digital signatures, hash functions and commitment schemes is also assumed.

Building on what you have already learned in your introductory crypto course, CSE208 explores more complex primitives and protocols, which typically combine cryptography with some form of general purpose comptuation, like zero knowledge proof systems, functional encryption, forms of verifiable computation, secure two-party and multi-party computation, and fully homomorphic encryption.

In Fall 2023, the course will focus on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), i.e., encryption schemes that allow the evaluation of arbitrary functions on encrypted data.


Reading and Homework

The course has no textbook. Reading/study material for the course will consist of lecture notes (mostly slides from lecture), research papers and surveys. Anything below the dashed line is material from a previous edition of the course, which you can use as a reference and or take a peek at what we may be doing next. But this quarter the course will a bit different. As we progress through the course, past material will be updated and moved above the line, and new material may be posted.

Introduction to FHE

FHE Definition, Composability and Bootstrapping

Public Key Encryption from the LWE

Papers:

Homomorphic Addition and Multiplication

Homomorphic addition (linearity) and multiplication was covered in blackboard lectures using the gadget product operations. (See class notes on “Gadget LWE”.) The following slides are from the previous year and use somehow different notation, still may be a useful reference.

Papers:

Schemes and Bootstrapping algorithms

Slides from previous year:

For a good survey/introduction to FHEW/TFHE, see

A recent method using BGV/BFV to bootstrap FHEW-like ciphertexts is

FHE Surveys

Some open source libraries implementing FHE schemes: