- Location and time
Class: MWF 10-10:50 am, Geology 4645
Discussion: R 10-10:50 am, Geology 4645- Instructor
Martin Gallauer
Office hours: M 3:00-4:30 pm- TA
Zuhair Mullath
Office hours: R 1:00-2:30 pm- Textbook
Hoffstein, Pipher, Silverman: An Introduction to Mathematical Cryptography. Springer UTM, 2014.
Note: The textbook is freely available for download through SpringerLink. (You need to access the website from within the campus network, or use the UCLA proxy server.)
- Homework
Weekly homework will be announced on ccle and the solutions will be collected on Fridays at the beginning of class. (The first homework set will be due on January 20.)
Working in groups could be a more efficient way of learning. You are permitted (and encouraged) to meet with other students in the class to study the material of the course and/or get help for the homework. However, the homework you turn in must be written by you in your own words.
- Testing
- First midterm: Friday, February 3, 10:00 am-10:50 am, KNSY PV 1240B
- Second midterm: Friday, February 24, 10:00 am-10:50 am, KNSY PV 1240B
- Final exam: March 20, 11:30 am-14:30 pm, Geology 3656
- Grading
There will be no make-up exams, neither for the midterms nor for the final. However, some flexibility is built into the system by having two grading schemes. Your overall final grade will be the best of the following two variants:
- 10% best 6 homeworks + 40% both midterms + 50% final.
- 15% best 6 homeworks + 25% best midterm + 60% final.
Letter grades will not be assigned until the end of the quarter, at which point your composite numerical score will be converted into a letter grade based on class ranking. Approximately a third of the class will receive grades in the A+/A/A- range, and another third of the class will receive grades in the B+/B/B- range (unless something surprising happens).
The final exam must be taken in order to receive a passing grade.
Regrades on midterms and homework must be requested within one week of the date those are returned. After this time, no requests for corrections will be honored.
All grades will be recorded on myUCLA.
- Schedule
This is a tentative schedule for the course:
M W F 1 syllabus, introduction; shift ciphers modular arithmetic affine ciphers 2 holiday substitution ciphers, Chinese Remainder Theorem homework 1; Hill cipher 3 symmetric ciphers complexity theory, encoding schemes homework 2; one-time pad 4 pseudo-randomness, asymmetric cryptography finite fields first midterm 5 discrete logarithms Diffie-Hellman homework 3; Elgamal 6 algorithms for discrete logarithms Euler's formula homework 4; RSA 7 holiday RSA attacks second midterm 8 primality testing factoring integers homework 5; digital signatures 9 Hash functions homework 6; PGP, blind digital signatures 10 digital cash Bitcoin Bitcoin