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UGTCS Sp22 Special Topics in Cryptography reading group

The reading group will follow an abridged version of Stanford CS 355 Sp21.

Syllabus:

1. Intro to Cryptography
2. Intro to Cryptography cont.
3. Interactive proofs; Zero knowledge
4. Succinct Non-interactive Arguments (SNARGs) from Probabilistic Checkable Proofs; Polynomial commitments
5. Buffer week.
6. Oblivious Transfer; Two-party computation: Yao’s garble circuits
7. Secret sharing
8. Multi-party computation
9. Differential privacy
10. Buffer week
11. Private information retrieval
12. Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Each week’s content will be based on Section 5-12 of CS 161’s textbook for Week 1 and 2, and the corresponding lecture notes in Stanford CS 355 for the rest.

Our main references are the readings listed on Stanford CS 355’s syllabus. Additional resources that I find helpful/fun (this will be continuously updated):

• Past offerings of Stanford CS 355. Just change the url on their website.
• Lectures and notes by Vipul Goyal
• Dan Boneh’s book
• Henry Corrigan-Gibb’s class on Cryptosystems
• Justin Thaler’s book on proof systems

Fun stuff in Stanford CS 355 that are left out (can talk about if we have time)

• OWF => PRG => PRF => PRP => Block Cipher
• Discrete Log
• Elliptic Curves
• Pairing-based Cryptography
• SNARGs from Polynomial commitment + IOP
  • Thaler’s talk.
• More Lattice-based Cryptography