CS 459/698 - Privacy, Cryptography, Network and Data Security - Fall 2025

Schedule & Reading List

- Lecture slides and optional readings will be released shortly before each corresponding lecture.
Introduction
Lecture 1 - Logistics and Introduction to the course (Sep 4) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lec. 1 slides
Lecture 2 - Cryptography Basics (Sep 9th) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Boneh and Shoup (Applied Crypto) Lec. 2 slides
Data Protected at Rest
Lecture 3 - Public Key Cryptography (Sep 11) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Assignment 1 released Boneh (20 years of attacks on RSA) Lec. 3 slides
Lecture 4 - Integrity (Sep 16th) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Marlinspike (Cryptographic Doom)
Why it's harder to forge a SHA-1 certificate than it is to find a SHA-1 collision
SHA-1 collision found
Padding oracle attack
Lec. 4 slides
Lecture 5 - Discrete Logarithm, Diffie-Hellman, ElGamal (Sep 18) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
El Gamal Encryption Lec. 5 slides
Data Protected in Transit
Lecture 6 - Network Security Primer (Sep 23) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lec. 6 slides
Lecture 7 - Authentication (Sep 25) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lec. 7 slides
Lecture 8 - Authentication Protocols (Sep 30) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Assignment 1 due Lec. 8 slides
Lecture 9 - Security Through the Layers (Oct 2) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Assignment 2 released Lec. 9 slides
Lecture 10 - Secure Messaging (Oct 7) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
OTR paper Lec. 10 slides
Lecture 11 - Network Anonymity (Oct 9) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Tor design paper Lec. 11 slides
Lecture 12 - Encrypted Traffic Analysis (Oct 21) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
ENISA - Encrypted Traffic Analysis Lec. 12 slides
Lecture 13 - Network Steganography and Information Hiding (Oct 23) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lec. 13 slides
Lecture 14 - Blockchain (Oct 28) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
The centralized power of decentralized mining pools
Lec. 14 slides
Lecture 15 - Malicious Software (Oct 30) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Botnet takeover Lec. 15 slides
Midterm (Nov 4) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Midterm in class
Data Protected During Computation
Lecture 16 - Inference Attacks (Nov 6) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Assignment 2 due Dataset reconstruction attacks
Lec. 16 slides
Lecture 17 - Syntatic Notions of Privacy (Nov 11) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Assignment 3 released Broken Promises of Privacy
FOILing NYC's Taxi Trip Data
A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749
k-Anonymity: A Model for Protecting Privacy
l-Diversity: Privacy Beyond k-Anonymity
t-Closeness: Privacy Beyond k-Anonymity and l-Diversity
Lec. 17 slides
Lecture 18 - Differential Privacy (Nov 13) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Damien Desfontaines' friendly introduction to differential privacy
A list of real-world uses of differential privacy
Gautam Kamath's Algorithms for Private Data Analysis course at UW
Lec. 18 slides (draft)
Lecture 19 - Privacy-preserving Machine Learning (Nov 18) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lecture 20 - Adversarial Machine Learning (Nov 20) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lecture 21 - Multi-party Computation (Nov 25) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lecture 22 - Homomorphic Encryption (Nov 27) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Assignment 3 due
Bonus: TBD (Dec 2) Optional Readings Lecture Slides