Summary for Week 1

• Lecture 1:In this lecture we discussed the overview and schedule for the course. Importance of information security was also discussed. We started discussing symmetric ciphers. We briefly discussed various attacker models, such as known and chosen plaintext attacks. We started our discussion on classic ciphers.
  Date:Tu, 09/11/2007.
• Lecture 2: We finished our discussion of classic ciphers. We discussed one-time pads and puedo-random number generators (PrNGs). Specifically, we discussed linear congruential generator (LCG) and the Blub-Blum-Shub (BBS) PrNGs. Some references are given below.
  Reading assignments: chapter 2 from the Stallings book.
  Date:Th, 09/13/2007.
  • "the handbook" refers to Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot and Scott A. Vanstone, Handbook of Applied Cryptography, CRC Press, 2001. This book can be found online and a link is provided on the class homepage.
  • L. Blum, M. Blum, and M. Shub, A simple unpredictable psuedo-random generator, SIAM Journal of Computing, 15(1986), pages 364--383.