CSE 291 B00: Advanced Topics in Cryptography, Spring 00

URL: www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/mihir/cse291-00/index.html

Section ID: 370787. (This is the number you need to register. The class is now listed in studentlink and available for registration.)

Instructor: Mihir Bellare

Meets: Tu and Th 3:55 -- 5:15 in AP&M 4882.

Pre-requisites: CSE 207, 200, and 202, or permission of instructor.

Topics, plan and student requirements

The main focus is cryptographic protocols and underlying tools. Amongst topics we will discuss are:

• electronic payment protocols
• cryptographic primitives underlying electronic payment protocols such as blind signatures
• key distribution, entity authentication and session key exchange
• Additional topics according to interests of participants.

I will begin the class by trying to overview the different models and types of electronic payment mechanisms. We will try to understand the security and commercial issues involved in choosing between different types of payments.

Each student will be expected to

• Pick a topic
• Give a presentation on it, either whiteboard or slide based
• Provide with the presentation a writeup that others can refer to during the presentation and also use later to recall the main ideas

Joint projects are allowed but not joint presentations. That is, a group of students might want to get together, research a topic or set of related topics, and then each deliver one presentation. (The accompanying writeup could be in common, or separate, as they prefer.) You are encouraged to discuss the work together even if you don't ``officially'' collaborate. You are also encouraged to correlate your topics and sequence them effectively relative to other people's topics.

Recommended text

An order for 15 copies was placed at the UCSD bookstore March 31, 2000. It will take a few weeks for them to get the books. Amazon prices it at $69 and delivers in about a week. You may want to glance at a copy before deciding whether to buy at this price! The information in it is mostly available on the web (see below) but not in as collected and accesible a form.

For the other topics there is no suitable text.

Background materiel

• CSE207 course notes .
• Lecture notes on Cryptography by Goldwasser and Bellare, July 1999.

References on electronic payments

• Electronic payment mechanisms by Roger Clarke
• Electronic payment schemes by Phillip M. Hallam-Baker of the W3C electronic commerce interest group.
• A bibliography of electronic payment information by Steven Ketchpel.
• Payment mechanisms and digital cash by Michael Peirce.
• Electronic payment systems by Donal O'Mahony, Michael Peirce, and Hitesh Tewari. Artech House, ISBN 0890069255, 1997. [Recommended course text]
• Digital Cash : Commerce on the Net by Peter Wayner. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, ISBN 0127887725, 1997.
• Course notes on payment systems (pdf), by Birgit Pfitzmann.
• Electronic payments: where do we go from here? Article by Jakobsson, M'Raihi, Tsiounnis and Yung.
• Atomicity in electronic commerce (ps), by Doug Tygar. A good discussion of some of the ``real world'' problems with ecash.
• The International financial cryptography association has links to all the Financial Cryptography conferences.
• The Siren song of Internet Micropayments by Steve Crocker of CyberCash: A nice explanation of why micropayments have had a much smaller impact than people anticipated.
• Papers on electronic cash, collected by Jee-Yeon Kim.
• Electronic cash by Stefan Brands, Chapter 44 in "Handbook on Algorithms and Theory of Computation," edited by Michael Atallah, November 1998, CRC Press,
• Brands' cash simplified, by Hal Finney: part 1 ; part 2 ; part 3.

Calendar

Day	Lecturer	Topic	Sources
Tuesday April 4	Mihir	Overview of electronic payment
Thursday April 6	Sara	Forward secure digital signatures
Tuesday April 11	No class	No class
Thursday April 13	Mihir	On-Line Ecash
Tuesday April 18	Anand	Auctions
Thursday April 20	Sasha	Micropayments
Tuesday April 25	Mihir	Off-Line Ecash
Thursday April 27	Mihir	Brands' ecash schemes
Tuesday May 2	Mihir	Brands' ecash schemes
Thursday May 4	Jee hea	SET and blinding of CC numbers	pdf of paper
Tuesday May 9	Alejandro	Electronic voting schemes	paper
Thursday May 11	Mihir	Probabilistic Micropayments	lottery and coin-flips
Tuesday May 16	No Class	No Class
Thursday May 18	No Class	No Class
Tuesday May 23	Edward	NetBill and NetCheque
Thursday May 25	Mihir
Tuesday May 30	Michel	Security arguments for blind signatures	paper
Thursday June 1	Alex	Group blind signatures	paper ; MS thesis
Tuesday June 6	Meaw	Identification protocols
Thursday June 8	Mike	Fair exchange and contract signing

General links

• List of pointers to crypto information on the web.