Instructor:
Nadia Heninger
(nadiah at cs dot ucsd dot edu)
Lectures:
Tuesday/Thursday 2pm-3:20pm EBU3B 2154
Grading:
50%: Class Participation
50%: Final Project
Wikipedia defines a cypherpunk as "one who advocates the widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a means of effecting social and political change." In the 1990s, the cypherpunk movement anticipated a number of technologies and ideas that have since become real, including cryptocurrencies, encrypted messaging, anonymized network communications, data havens, anonymous marketplaces, and the use of cryptography to aid in civil disobedience. In this course, we will explore the politics and history of these ideas and how they played out in reality from a technical and cultural perspective.
This will be an interactive discussion-oriented class. The schedule includes readings for each day, some of which are technical and some of which are not. Please prepare your thoughts on the readings along with questions for group discussion before each class meeting, and be prepared to present aspects you find interesting to your classmates.
You will also carry out a research project on privacy-enhancing technologies in small groups.
| Topic | Readings | Cryptonomicon | |
| 4/1 | Introduction | ||
| 4/3 | The Cypherpunks | A Cypherpunk's Manifesto by Eric Hughes, 1993 Crypto Rebels by Steven Levy, 1993 The Californian Ideology by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, 1996 The Cyphernomicon: Cypherpunks FAQ by Timothy May, 1994 (You do not have to read the whole thing. Skim it and pick out the parts that you find notable.) | |
| 4/8 | Anonymity, Cryptography, and Politics |
Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses, and Digital Pseudonyms by David Chaum, 1981 Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to make Big Brother Obsolete by David Chaum, 1985 The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work by Philip Rogaway 2015 | Mailing lists and email anonymizers |
| 4/10 | PGP: Pretty Good Privacy | ``A Pretty Good History of PGP'' by Simson Garfinkel. PGP: Pretty Good Privacy Ch. 4 Pretty Good Privacy on Wikipedia Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0 by Alma Whitten and J. D. Tygar 1999 | Email encryption |
| 4/15 | OTR: Off-The-Record Messaging | Off-the-Record Communication, or, Why Not To Use PGP by Nikita Borisov, Ian Goldberg, and Eric Brewer 2004 'I Can't Believe What I'm Confessing to You': The Wikileaks Chats by Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter, 2010 | |
| 4/17 | Signal | GPG and Me by Moxie Marlinspike 2015 The X3DH Key Agreement Protocol by Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin 2016 The Double Ratchet Algorithm by Trevor Perrin and Moxie Marlinspike Real-World Deniability in Messaging by Daniel Collins, Simone Colombo, and Lois Huguenin-Dumittan, 2025 | |
| 4/22 | Guest lecture by Rolfe Schmidt: Signal in Practice | The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans by Jeffrey Goldberg 2025 | |
| 4/24 | Tor | Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router by Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and Paul Syverson, 2004 | Network anonymizers |
| 4/29 | Guest lecture by Roger Dingledine | The Dark Net Rises by Ben Collier, 2024 The Activists by Ben Collier, 2024 | |
| 5/1 | Data Havens | The Free Haven Project: Design and Deployment of an Anonymous Secure Data Haven by Roger Dingledine 2000 Welcome to Sealand. Now Bugger Off. by Simson Garfinkel, 2000 HavenCo: what really happened by Ryan Lackey, 2003 | |
| 5/6 | Wikileaks | Cypherpunk Ethics: Transparency for the Powerful by Anderson 2022 (on Canvas) Wikipedia: Wikileaks No Secrets by Khatchadourian 2010 Julian Assange walks free after pleading guilty to US espionage charge in Saipan court 2024 | |
| 5/8 | Guest Lecture by Cory Myers: SecureDrop | Anatomy of a whisteblowing system, 2024 How to research your own cryptography and survive, 2024 Introducing SecureDrop Protocol, 2024 Optional: A formal analysis of the SecureDrop protocol by Luca Maier, 2025 | |
| 5/13 | Early Digital Currencies | Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments by David Chaum, 1982 DigiCrash NEXT, 1999 | |
| 5/15 | Bitcoin | Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakamoto, 2009 A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names by Sarah Meiklejohn et al., 2013 | |
| 5/20 | ZCash | Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin by Eli Ben-Sasson et al., 2014 | |
| 5/22 | Web3 is Going Just Great | Web3 is Going Just Great by Molly White |