About the Course

Lectures: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM, in WLH 2204
Discussion sections: Wednesdays, 4:00–4:50 PM, in WLH 2204
Final exam: Tuesday, 9 June, 11:30–2:29 PM, in WLH 2204
Instructor: Hovav Shacham, hovav@cs.ucsd.edu
  Office hours: Tuesdays, 8:30–10:30 AM, on Zoom
Teaching assistant: Alex Bellon
  Office hours: Tuesdays, 12:30–2:30 PM, in CSE 3127

Course Description

This course is an introduction to modern cryptography. Cryptography, broadly speaking, is about communicating in the presence of an adversary, with goals like preservation of privacy and integrity of communicated data. We will cover symmetric (private key), including block ciphers, symmetric encryption, hash functions, message authentication, authenticated encryption; and asymmetric (public key) cryptography, including public-key encryption and key encapsulation, digital signatures, factoring, discrete logarithms, elliptic curves, and basic post-quantum cryptography; and applications of cryptography, including certificates, the public-key infrastructure, key distribution, and protocols like TLS.

This is not a general computer security course. If you are interested in systems security, microarchitectural security, network security, Web security, usable security, or other topics like these, please take CSE 127.