Markus Schmidmeier
Department of Mathematical Sciences
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, Florida 33431-0991
Here is some information about my course in Fall 2003 on
Introductory Cryptography.
This is MAT 5932, we meet Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 4 - 4:50 p.m. in PS 113. Prerequisite for this course is Modern Algebra MAS 4301.
Textbook and Topics
We are going to use the textbook "Introduction to Cryptography with Coding Theory" by W. Trappe and L. C. Washington (Prentice Hall, 2002).
Here are the main topics in this course:
- History. We start with a short review of some classical cryptographical systems, and their weaknesses (Chapter 2).
- Finite Fields and AES. In 2002, the National Institute for Standards and Technology has chosen the Rijndael system to become the new Advanced Encryption Standard. Before covering the system, we review arithmetic in finite fields (Chapter 3.10, and 5).
- Making and Breaking RSA. The security of the RSA system is based on the complexity of factoring numbers as products of primes. We cover Primality Testing (for setting up RSA keys) and Factoring Algorithms (for breaking RSA keys) (Chapter 6).
- ElGamal. The security of this system is based on the complexity of taking discrete logarithms (Chapter 7).
- A variety of Applications: Digital Signatures, Secret Sharing, Gaming over the Telephone, Zero-Knowledge techniques, and Electronic Voting will form the largest part of this course (much of Chapters 8-13).
- Outlook. As time permits, we will attempt some mathematically more advanced topics like the Elliptic Curve cryptosystem, and Quantum Cryptography (Chapters 15 and 17).
CreditHomework: Every week, homework problems will be assigned; some problems will be related to questions on the quiz. Here is a link to current homework problems.
Quizzes: There'll be a 25-minute quiz every Friday; the ten best quizzes count for 1/3 of the grade.
Extra Credit: Some problems will require the use of a computer algebra system such as Maple or MuPAD. , and for those you can get Extra Credit, counting towards you quiz score. Thus, scores of 100% or above are possible !
Midterm Exam: We will have a First Midterm Exam on October 6, the Second Midterm Exams is on November 22, each counts for 1/6 of the grade.
Final Exam: The final exam on Friday, December 5, 4-6:30 p.m., is comprehensive. It will count for 1/2 of your grade.
For your Calendar Last day to drop without consequences: Tuesday, September 2
Last day to drop without getting a "W": Monday, September 8
Last day to drop without receiving an "F": Friday, October 17Latest News: On Wednesday, September 3, 4 p.m. we meet in the Computer Lab S&E 271.
Contact Me
Office hours: MTRF 11 a.m. - 12 noon, in S&E 278, or after class (during term time).
Course Web Page: http://www.math.fau.edu/schmidme/crypto-2003.html
E-mail: mschmidm@fau.edu..
Last modified: , by Markus Schmidmeier