Markus Schmidmeier , Department of Mathematical Sciences , Florida Atlantic University
Introductory Cryptography.
Welcome to my Cryptography course ! We meet Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:30 - 10:50 a.m. in PS 113. Both graduate students and undergraduates can be enrolled in this course, the numbers are MAT 5932 and MAT 4930. Prerequisite for this course is a working knowledge of Number Theory (MAS 3203) or Modern Algebra (MAS 4301), or the material in sections 3.1 to 3.6 in our textbook.
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. Public Key Cryptographic systems like RSA form one of the most exciting developments in modern cryptography. The security of RSA 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).
Credit
Homework: 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 Thursday; 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: On Thursday, October 28, we will have a Midterm Exam which will count for 1/4 of the grade.
Final Exam: The final exam on Thursday, December 9, 7:45 - 10:15 AM, is comprehensive. It will count for 5/12 of your grade.
For your Calendar
There were changes concerning the drop dates. See the academic calendar:
http://www.fau.edu/registrar/docs/acadcal0405.pdf
Contact Me
Office hours: MW, 2-3 p.m. and TR 11-12 a.m., in SE 278 (during term time), or after class in our classroom
E-mail: markus@math.fau.edu.
Last modified: , by Markus Schmidmeier