Applied Cryptography Specialization

Welcome to Symmetric Cryptography!

Symmetric cryptography relies on shared secret key to ensure message confidentiality, so that the unauthorized attackers cannot retrieve the message. The course describes substitution and transposition techniques, which were the bases for classical cryptography when the message is encoded in natural language such as English. Then, we build on product ciphers (using both substitution and transposition/permutation) to describe modern block ciphers and review the widely used cipher algorithms in DES, 3-DES, and AES. Lastly, we enable the use of block ciphers to support variable data length by introducing different modes of block cipher operations in ECB, CBC, CFB, OFB, and CTR modes. This course is cross-listed and is a part of the two specializations, the Applied Cryptography specialization and the Introduction to Applied Cryptography specialization.

Welcome to Asymmetric Cryptography and Key Management!

In asymmetric cryptography or public-key cryptography, the sender and the receiver use a pair of public-private keys, as opposed to the same symmetric key, and therefore their cryptographic operations are asymmetric. This course will first review the principles of asymmetric cryptography and describe how the use of the pair of keys can provide different security properties. Then, we will study the popular asymmetric schemes in the RSA cipher algorithm and the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange protocol and learn how and why they work to secure communications/access. Lastly, we will discuss the key distribution and management for both symmetric keys and public keys and describe the important concepts in public-key distribution such as public-key authority, digital certificate, and public-key infrastructure. This course also describes some mathematical concepts, e.g., prime factorization and discrete logarithm, which become the bases for the security of asymmetric primitives, and working knowledge of discrete mathematics will be helpful for taking this course; the Symmetric Cryptography course (recommended to be taken before this course) also discusses modulo arithmetic. This course is cross-listed and is a part of the two specializations, the Applied Cryptography specialization and the Introduction to Applied Cryptography specialization.

Welcome to Cryptographic Hash and Integrity Protection!

This course reviews cryptographic hash functions in general and their use in the forms of hash chain and hash tree (Merkle tree). Building on hash functions, the course describes message authentication focusing on message authentication code (MAC) based on symmetric keys. We then discuss digital signatures based on asymmetric cryptography, providing security properties such as non-repudiation which were unavailable in symmetric-cryptography-based message authentication. This course is a part of the Applied Cryptography specialization.