AMSI Winter School on Cryptography • Provable Security

In 2014 I gave a series of introductory lectures on cryptography and provable security for the AMSI Winter School on Cryptography at the University of Queensland.

Lecture materials are below. Lecture 1 provides a nice (in my opinion) 1-lecture overview of the basics of cryptography and could act as a good review/refresher. The notes for lectures 2 and 3 provide an introduction to provable security, including some worked examples, and are based in part on other researchers’ tutorials on provable security.

Lecture 1: Cryptographic Building Blocks

Lecture 1 slides (PDF)

• Related textbook: Cryptography, An Introduction by Nigel Smart, available for free from author’s website
• Related textbook: Handbook of Applied Cryptography by Menezes, van Oorschot, and Vanstone, available for free from author’s website, but fairly out-of-date now

Lecture 2 and 3: An Introduction to Provable Security

Lecture 2-3 notes (PDF)

• Related slides: A Brief Introduction to Provable Security by Alex Dent
• Related article: Contemporary Cryptology Provable Security for Public Key Schemes by David Pointcheval

Lecture 4: Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and the Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol

Lecture 4 slides (PDF)

• Practical: X.509 Certificates and Secure Email
• Practical: Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Wireshark
• Related textbook: Applied Information Security by Basin, Schaller, Schläpfer, Chapter 7 “Certificates and Public Key Cryptography”