Schedule — Fall 2026 (DRAFT)

Lectures meet Mondays and Wednesdays, 3:00–4:15 pm. No class on Labor Day (Sep 7) or Thanksgiving break (Nov 23–27). Readings marked book are draft chapters of the instructor’s draft book, distributed to enrolled students; notes are instructor-written course notes posted on this site; B&S is Boneh–Shoup (supplementary).

Assignment milestones are shown in the right column. Code-review labs are 15-minute individual sessions scheduled outside class time during the weeks indicated.

#	Date	Topic	Reading	Milestones
1	Mon Aug 31	Introduction: practical cryptography, threat models, and how this course works in the agent era	notes	A1 out
2	Wed Sep 2	Classical ciphers and cryptanalysis	MTU Vigenère cryptanalysis tutorial (esp. frequency analysis, Kasiski, and index-of-coincidence pages); optional: Friedman, The Index of Coincidence and Its Applications in Cryptanalysis (1922)
—	Mon Sep 7	No class — Labor Day
3	Wed Sep 9	Symmetric encryption I: block ciphers and modes of operation	book ch. 5; B&S ch. 2–3
4	Mon Sep 14	Symmetric encryption II: padding, chaining pitfalls, authenticated encryption	book ch. 5; B&S ch. 5, 9
5	Wed Sep 16	Hash functions and message authentication	book ch. 6; B&S ch. 6–8	A1 due Fri Sep 18
6	Mon Sep 21	Randomness, entropy, and key derivation	book ch. 11	A2 out · Review Lab 1 this week
7	Wed Sep 23	Public-key cryptography I: number-theoretic background, RSA, and how RSA breaks	book PK ch. (fragments, as available); B&S app. A; RSA attack papers
8	Mon Sep 28	Public-key cryptography II: Diffie–Hellman, elliptic curves, and the KEM abstraction	book PK ch. (fragments, as available); B&S §10.3–10.4
9	Wed Sep 30	Public-key cryptography III: post-quantum key exchange — lattices and ML-KEM	notes; Valsorda, The Math of ML-KEM; FIPS 203
10	Mon Oct 5	Digital signatures and PKI (ECDSA; ML-DSA in brief); midterm review	notes; FIPS 204
11	Wed Oct 7	Midterm exam 1 (in class)		Midterm 1
12	Mon Oct 12	Protocols I: TLS design, including hybrid post-quantum key exchange	notes; B&S ch. 15
13	Wed Oct 14	Protocols II: a history of TLS attacks	SSL/TLS attack papers
14	Mon Oct 19	Secure messaging: OTR, Signal, ratcheting, and PQXDH	notes + Signal specs
15	Wed Oct 21	Side channels I: timing attacks	notes; timing-attack papers	A2 due Fri Oct 23
16	Mon Oct 26	Side channels II: padding oracles and format oracles	notes; B&S §4.3.2	A3 out · Review Lab 2 this week
17	Wed Oct 28	Implementation failures: nonce reuse, RNG failures, real-world postmortems	notes + postmortems
18	Mon Nov 2	Multi-party computation I: secret sharing	notes; B&S §22.1
19	Wed Nov 4	Multi-party computation II: garbled circuits	garbled circuits primer
20	Mon Nov 9	Zero-knowledge proofs I	notes
21	Wed Nov 11	Zero-knowledge proofs II: applications	notes
22	Mon Nov 16	Midterm exam 2 (in class)		Midterm 2
23	Wed Nov 18	Anonymous communication: Tor	Tor design paper
—	Nov 23–27	No class — Thanksgiving break
24	Mon Nov 30	Anonymity II: mixnets and iCloud Private Relay	Private Relay analysis
25	Wed Dec 2	Cryptographic backdoors: Dual EC and the Juniper incident	Juniper/Dual EC paper	A3 due Fri Dec 4
26	Mon Dec 7	Special topic: cryptography and AI agents	notes	Review Lab 3 this week
27	Wed Dec 9	Wrap-up and final exam review
—	TBA	Final exam (December exam period, scheduled by registrar)		Final

Assignment overview

Assignment 1 — Classical cryptanalysis. Implement the Vigenère cipher, then break it: index-of-coincidence key-length recovery and ciphertext-only frequency analysis. Security-critical regions and review-lab focus announced in the handout.
Assignment 2 — Encrypted messaging: build it and break it. Implement a complete client for the JMessage end-to-end encrypted messaging system against a reference server, then implement an automated adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack that decrypts another user’s intercepted message.
Assignment 3 — TBA. Released in late October.

Each assignment is followed by a code-review lab round (see Syllabus); the autograder gate and review multiplier apply.