Instructor: Zvi Kedem, zvi.kedem@nyu.edu,
(212) 998-3101, 715 Broadway, Room 702.
Office hours: Tuesdays: 2:00-3:00 and 5:30-6:30
Class information:
This is a special topics course, not intended to cover a well-defined topic.
The class will be runs as a combination of lectures and research seminar. It
will focus on two areas:
- Cryptographic foundations of various security protocols. This will include
explaining the mathematical results that are used, with proofs kept to the
barest minimum and many mathematical results explained without proofs. The
cryptographic algorithms and protocols covered will mostly be selected from
the list: key exchange, authentication, secret sharing, digital signatures,
timestamping services, subliminal channels, undeniable signatures, bit
commitment, coin flipping on the telephone, all or nothing disclosure of
secrets, zero knowledge proofs, digital certified mail, elections, digital
cash, DES, RSA, key management, compromised key handling
- Selected papers/research directions of current interest, some covered by
outside security experts and researchers.
There will be no programming projects. If the class is small (<=12),
students will be required to read some research paper(s), and write a report and
possibly present it in class or to the instructor. If the class is medium
(<=20), there will be a smaller requirement for independent reading of papers
and there will be a final. If the class is large (>20); there will be a
midterm and a final and no independent reading. The exams will all be open
books.
As there will be no textbook, students really should attend practically every
class.
There will be some overlap of material with previous security classes taught
in the department.
A class mailing list has been set up. You are expected to sign up for it and
read the email you get from it regularly. You sign up by sending email to the
address majordomo@zmkedem.com. In the
body of the message put the following line:
subscribe sec-class
and nothing else. You will get a confirmation with
some message; ignore what it says. You will not be able to post to this list or
unsubscribe from it. I will use it to send email to the students.
Some of the books I am consulting; to the extent possible they will be on
reserve at CIMS library. They greatly vary in the way they treat the material
and the choice of material; from mathematics to implementation details; from
very formal to very informal.(You are not required to have them; from all I most
recommend Schneier's book, which while readable is not very formal.)
- Grant Gail L. Understanding Digital Signatures. McGraw-Hill, 1998.
- Kaufman, Charlie; Perlman, Radia; Speciner, Mike. Network Security:
Private Communication in a Public World, Prentice Hall, 1995.
- Krankis, Evangelos. Primality and Cryptography. Wiley-Teubner
Series in Computer Science, 1986.
- Menezes, Alfred J., Oorschot, Paul C. van; Vanstone, Scott A. Handbook
of Applied Cryptography, CRC Press, 1997.
- Nichols, Randall. ICSA Guide to Cryptography, McGraw Hill, 1999.
- Oppliger, Rolf. Security Technologies for the World Wide Web, Artech
House, 2000.
- Schneier, Bruce. Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and
Source Code in C, Second Edition, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1996.
Also look at the errata at http://www.counterpane.com/ac2errv30.html
(Note: many errors/inaccuracies are still not accounted for)
- Stallings, William. Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and
Practice, Second Edition, Prentice Hall, 1998. Stinson, Dounglas.
Cryptography: Theory and Practice, CRC Press, 1995.
- Stallings, William. Network Security Essentials. Prentice Hall,
2000.
- Stinson, Douglas R. Cryptography: Theory and Practice (Discrete
Mathematics and Its Applications)