CS 395T: Topics in Cryptography

Description

This is an advanced cryptography course that will cover recent advancements in cryptography. The main theme of this course is lattice-based cryptography, and specifically, on using lattices to construct powerful cryptographic primitives for protecting and verifying computations. We will study primitives like fully homomorphic encryption, functional encryption, homomorphic signatures, NIZKs, SNARKs, and also discuss how to leverage these building blocks to build new privacy-preserving systems. As a bonus, most of the constructions we study in this course are conjectured to be post-quantum secure.

Final project reports: Read the students’ final projects online here!

Meeting Time and Place

Location: GDC 1.406 or Zoom (via Canvas)
Time: Monday, Wednesday, 2pm-3:30pm

Note: This course supports attendance in-person and over Zoom. All in-person sessions will also be available live via Zoom and recordings will be available via Canvas. You are encouraged to participate in the course by either attending the in-person meeting or by joining the live Zoom session. If you are unable to attend live (either in person or via Zoom), then you can watch the recordings to access the lecture material. Lecture notes will also be posted here after each lecture.

Logistics

Canvas: We will use Canvas, which includes links to Piazza (for announcements and class discussions), Gradescope (for assignment submission and grading), and Zoom (for attending lectures remotely and accessing lecture recordings). Lecture notes for each lecture are available here.

Piazza: We will use Piazza for class discussions and for sending out course announcements. If you have a question about the course material or course logistics, please post it on Piazza instead of emailing the course staff directly.

Gradescope: Homework and project submissions will be handled via Gradescope. You should be automatically enrolled in the course via Canvas once the semester starts. You should email your scribe notes (LaTeX source only) to the instructur (dwu4@cs.utexas.edu).

Homework: Please see the Course Organization and Policies page for details on how to format and submit the assignments as well as the collaboration policy for the course.

Prerequisites

This is an advanced cryptography course, and we will assume familiarity with all of the topics covered in CS 388H. If you have not taken CS 388H and are still interested in taking the course, I strongly encourage you to talk to me before enrolling.

Course Notes

We will ocassionally post supplementary notes here:

• Discrete Gaussian Sampling Summary