COSC 350 Schedule, Spring 2002

Note: Schedule is preliminary and subject to change.

January 15 - Basic Concepts

Cryptography, encryption and decryption, symmetric (single-key) and asymmetric (public-key) cryptography, cryptanalysis, cryptographic strength, role of cryptography in information security.

Schneier, through p. 10.  Mel, through p. 6.

Slides

Homework #1

January 22 - Modular Arithmetic

Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division mod N.  Addition, mulitiplication, and exponentiation ciphers.  Euler totient function, Euclid's algorithm.

Denning, Cryptography and Data Security, pp. 35-48. Schneier, pp. 242-251.  Mel, pp. 101-107, 273-277, 297-300.

Slides

Homework #2

January 29 - Substitution and Transposition Ciphers, Information Theory

Simple substitution ciphers, polyalphabetic substitution ciphers, homophonic substitution ciphers, Beale ciphers, polygram substitution ciphers. Entropy, unicity distance, redundancy.  Confusion and diffusion.

Schneier, pp. 233-237.  Mel, ch 2-4, 6.

Slides

Homework #3

February 5 - Polyalphabetic Substitution Ciphers

Breaking Vigenère ciphers, index of coincidence, Kasiski method, rotor machines, Vernam cipher, one-time pad.

Schneier, pp. 10-17.

Slides

Homework #4.  The programs you need for this assignment are in hw4-programs.zip.  Download this into a folder "assign4" on your disk and unzip it.

February 12 - Block Ciphers

Feistel networks, Data Encryption Standard (DES), Triple DES, Advance Encryption Standard (AES), Skipjack, breaking block ciphers.

Schneier, pp. 151-158, 265-295, 303-350, 357-363.  Mel, ch. 5, pp. 263-264.

Slides

Homework #5

AES - http://aes.nist.gov

RSA Challenge Ciphers - http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/challenges/index.html

distributed.net - http://www.distributed.net

Bruce Schneier, A Self Study Course in Block-Cipher Cryptanalysis

February 19 - Stream ciphers,  Modes of Operation

Synchronous and self-synchronizing stream ciphers, modes of operating block ciphers, linear feedback shift registers, random number generation.

Schneider, pp. 44-46, 189-211, 369-428.  Mel, pp. 57-59, 314-319.

Slides

Homework #6

February 26 - Authentication and Key Distribution

One-way functions and password protection, one-time passwords, login authentication, keyed and non-keyed hashing, SHA and MD5, message authentication codes (MACs), chaffing and winnowing. Needham Schroeder protocol and variants, Kerberos, trusted third parties.

Schneier, pp. 29-31, 47, 56-68, 429-459, 566-571.  Mel, ch. 7, 8, 14.

Slides

Homework #7

March 12 - Exam

Midterm exam.

March 19 - No class

March 26 - Public-Key Cryptography, Digital Signatures

Public-key agreement, Diffie-Hellman protocol.  Public-key encryption, digital signatures, RSA method, finding primes, factoring, Digital Signature Standard, elliptic curve cryptography.

Schneier, pp, 185-187, 461-502, 513-518.  Mel, ch. 9-13, 15, pp. 277-314.

Slides

Homework #8

RSA: http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/challenges/factoring/faq.html

April 2 - Digital Certificates, PKI, Key Recovery

Digital certificates (X.509 and Verisign), public-key infrastructure (PKI), certificate authorities and hierarchies, PGP web of trust, key recovery/escrow objectives and approaches, Clipper/Capstone chip, secret sharing, threshold systems.

Schneier, pp. 178-185, 528-531, 584-587, 591-596.  Mel, ch. 16-18.

Slides

Homework #9

April 9 - Crypto Applications

E-mail, S/MIME, PGP, SSL, IPSec, SSH.

Schneier, pp. 588-590.  Mel, pp. 204-262, 321-335.

Slides

Homework #10

April 16 - Wireless Applications

cellular telephony, fraud, and solutions.  802.11 networks and security. Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol.

Slides - from guest speaker L. Owens.

April 23 - Steganography (self-study; no class, but homework due next class)

Steganographic methods, tools, steganalysis.

Excerpts from Denning, Information Warfare and Security. Neil F. Johnson, http://www.jjtc.com/Steganography/

Homework #11

April 30 - Quantum Cryptography; Review

Slides

May 7, 4:00-6:00 PM, Reiss 284 - Final Exam (Comprehensive)