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/