Winter 2023
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 Winter 2023, the course will focus on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), i.e., encryption schemes that allow the evaluation of arbitrary functions on encrypted data.
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 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.
Lecture notes: Course Introduction (slides)
Fully Homomorphic Encryption from the Ground Up: slides from invited talk at Eurocrypt 2019. See motivations/applications pp.1-9. If you want to watch the whole talk, you can find it here
Supplemental reading: some magazine articles with informal presentation of FHE
Lecture notes: Defining FHE (slides)
Fully Homomorphic Encryption, 10 Years Later: Definitions and Open Problems: slides from talk at Simons Instititue 10th Anniversary Symposium, 2022 video. There is also a slightly longer talk from FHE.org at video slides
Lecture notes: Bootstrapping (slides)
Lecture notes: “Fully Composable Homomorphic Encryption” (class handout)
Homework 1: Due Tue. Jan 31, in class
For more information about circular (in)security, see the following papers and references therein:
Papers:
Papers:
Fundamentals of Fully Homomorphic Encryption - A Survey (Brakerski, in “Providing Sound Foundations for Cryptography”, ACM books, 2019)
Homomorphic Encryption (Halevi, in “Tutorials on the Foundations of Cryptography”, 2017)