Cryptography 101: Course Overview & Key Concepts 🔐

After the customary introduction to the course, in this lecture I give a basic overview of symmetric and public-key cryptography. Topics covered:

- Security models in cryptography
- Taxonomy of cryptosystems
- Unconditionally secure ciphers: the One-Time Pad
- Vernam-like stream ciphers and pseudorandom number generators
- One-way functions, the basis of modern cryptography
- Block ciphers and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
- Basics of public-key cryptography
- The Diffie-Hellman key agreement scheme
- The RSA public-key encryption algorithm
- Mentions of quantum computing and post-quantum cryptography

Reading Material:
- Slides of the lecture: https://lucamariot.org/files/slides/ai_crypto_2023_lecture_1.pdf

Nice textbooks on cryptography:

- J. Katz, Y. Lindell. Introduction to Modern Cryptography. 3rd ed. CRC Press, 2021
- N. P. Smart. Cryptography: An Introduction. 1st ed. McGraw-Hill, 2004 (freely available on the author’s website: https://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~nsmart/Crypto_Book/)
- D. R. Stinson. Cryptography: Theory and Practice. 3rd ed. CRC Press, 2006

Website of the course, with reading material and more: https://lucamariot.org/teaching/ai-crypto/