I 690 Applied Cryptography

Markus Jakobsson, markus@indiana.edu

Cryptography and computer security are, increasingly, necessary components of the ubiquitous infrastructure, with applications ranging from countermeasures to phishing attacks and denial of service attacks, to security measures within vehicular ad hoc networks, digital rights schemes, and more.

This course will cover these topics with the aim of giving a foundation in adversarial modeling; protocol design and analysis; and critical thinking. The course will be half lectures and half seminar; in the lecture part of the course, I will highlight noteworthy results within a range of topics relating to applied cryptography, network security, and privacy. The other half of the class will consist of presentations (by students and invited speakers) covering the same topics in the context of scientific papers constituting the reading material of the class.

To some extent, the exact topics to be covered will be chosen by the students registered for the class, allowing us to cover topics of particular interest within the class. This may include work performed by the registered students in other classes, as long as the material is of relevance to the class.

A partial list of topics to be covered is as follows:

Phishing; pharming; spam; malware; design of security experiments; countermeasures.

Ad hoc networks; routing; reputation; authentication, light-weight security.

Computer forensics; user monitoring; privacy.

User interfaces; trusted computing; biometrics, passwords, hardware tokens.

Electronic elections, vote buying, denial of service.

Cryptographic primitives and building blocks.

Grading:

Students will be graded on in-class participation, results of a group project, and two homework assignments. A possible (but not necessary) outcome of the class is a publication within the field of applied cryptography and network security.