After successful completion of the course, students are able to...

• Explain, argue the security of, and identify generic attacks on (tweakable) block ciphers, forkciphers, and compression functions in encryption, message authentication, hashing, authenticated encryption, and key derivation modes, among others.
• Identify and reason about suitable use cases and applications of symmetric cryptographic schemes in higher level protocols and systems like TLS, IoT, end-to-end encryption, blockchains, etc.
• Reason about lightweight symmetric cryptographic security requirements and design criteria.
• Prove basic symmetric designs secure in the provable framework.
• Design and attack implementation of small-scale toy symmetric designs.
• Assess, and compare existing symmetric designs with respect to security levels, efficiency and applicability features.
• Present proofs, implementations and explain in detail contemporary use cases, attacks and/or security proofs on symmetric algorithms.

• Provable security and security notions in symmetric cryptography - pseudorandom functions and permutations, indistinguishability, unforgeability, collision resistance, etc.
• Designs and implementation strategies of building blocks: (tweakable) block ciphers, forkciphers, permutations, compression functions, etc.
• Secure modes of operation: encryption, message authentication, hashing, authenticated encryption, key derivation modes, etc.
• Symmetric lightweight cryptographic designs and the ongoing NIST competition. Attacks and crypto failures.
• Applications of symmetric cryptography: communication protocols like TLS, end-to-end encryption protocols, etc.

The course is run in presence.

• Role model and feedback-oriented learning: Presenting projects and homeworks, explaining, comparing, contrasting, and rating own and others solutions of assignments in semi-guided sessions.
• Hands-on assignments and in class presentations

ECTS Breakdown

30 h lectures

20 h = student presentations

48 h self- study

50 h = assignments and projects

2 h writen exam

150h Total

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• Homework and projects 40%
• Exam 60%

• Basic knowledge in Security/Cryptography
• Basic knowledge in probability theory
• Basic programming skills