This course introduces students to the theoretical foundations of modern cryptography. We will study multiple notions of security under various models with a focus on provable guarantees of security. We will show how to use primitives having weak security properties to construct schemes satisfying very strong notions of security. The emphasis of the course will be on general principles related to encryption (symmetric amp; public key), digital signature, message authentication and key distribution but, for concreteness, we shall also look at a number of examples and applications. The focus will be analysis of provable properties, using theoretical tools like one-way functions, collision-resistant hashing, pseudorandomness, number-theoretic results. Other advanced topics that could be covered are commitment schemes, zero-knowledge proofs, random oracles, secret sharing, advanced notions of security, and multi-party cryptographic protocols.
* Be able to identify and understand provable properties of cryptographic protocols
* Be able to design and analyse simple protocols using the primitives learnt in the course
* Be able to understand and analyse (to certain extent) complex protocols used in practice
* Be able to understand the difference between integrity, authenticity, malleability and other properties of secure protocols/constructions