Cryptography (4ECTS) is a course suitable for final year BSc students or for students on an MSc. It covers the technical and mathematical foundations of Cybersecurity, aka Cryptography, via computer science approach. Cryptography is a new course at the University of Klagenfurt. It expands on our existing offering and it suitable for students who have done Cryptography (or Introduction to Cybersecurity, or Systems Security). All lecture materials are available in English language (slides/notes, videos), the lecturer is Prof. Elisabeth Oswald who speaks both English and German.

Cryptography takes a deep dive into the subject. We begin by questioning what does “secure” even mean in different contexts, and learn how to map and intuitive and informal understand into something more formal and mathematical. Next we look at different types of symmetric cryptographic constructions and find out how we can build secure symmetric encryption, authentication and authenticated encryption schemes from them. Along the way we learn about padding oracles (and how they break CBC mode which was/is often the default mode of operation in systems like SSL/TLS), and we check out how such constructions are actually used in real worl protocols and applications specifically TLS, Signal, and LTE encryption. Then we turn our attention to distributing symmetric keys which brings to public key (or asymmetric) cryptography. We study the working principles of schemes like RSA and El Gamal and their underlying hard problesm (factoring and discrete logarithm, as well as Diffie-Hellman). Once more we also check out how these schemes are used in real world applications and protocols.

In the summer term 2019 this course ran as a “VO”, and all course material is availble here (just log in as guest).

In the summer term 2020 this course is run as a “VC” (i.e. there is partial compulsory attendance to faciliate interaction), and whilst a Moodle page will host quizzes, the course material will move to Github (lecture videos will become available as playlist on YouTube).