CS 459/659 - Privacy, Cryptography, Network and Data Security - Fall 2026

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 10) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lec. 1 slides
Lecture 2 - Cryptography Basics (Sep 15) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Boneh and Shoup (Applied Crypto) Lec. 2 slides
Data Protected at Rest
Lecture 3 - Public Key Cryptography (Sep 17) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Assignment 1 released Boneh (20 years of attacks on RSA) Lec. 3 slides
Lecture 4 - Integrity (Sep 22) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lecture 5 - Discrete Logarithm, Diffie-Hellman, ElGamal (Sep 24) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Data Protected in Transit
Lecture 6 - Network Security Primer (Sep 29) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lecture 7 - Authentication (Oct 1) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lecture 8 - Authentication Protocols (Oct 6) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lecture 9 - Security Through the Layers (Oct 8) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Assignment 1 due
Assignment 2 released
Lecture 10 - Secure Messaging (Oct 20) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lecture 11 - Network Anonymity (Oct 22) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
CS 659 Proposal due
Lecture 12 - Encrypted Traffic Analysis (Oct 27) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Midterm (Oct 29) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Midterm in class
Lecture 13 - Network Steganography and Information Hiding (Nov 3) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lecture 14 - Blockchain (Nov 5) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Data Protected During Computation
Lecture 15 - Inference Attacks (Nov 10) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lecture 16 - Syntatic Notions of Privacy (Nov 12) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Assignment 2 due
Lecture 17 - Differential Privacy (Nov 17) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Assignment 3 released
Lecture 18 - Privacy-preserving Machine Learning (Nov 19) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lecture 19 - Adversarial Machine Learning (Nov 24) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lecture 20 - Poisoning Attacks (Nov 26) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lecture 21 - Multi-party Computation (Dec 1) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lecture 22 - Homomorphic Encryption (Dec 3) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Lecture 23 - Bonus Content (Dec 8) Optional Readings Lecture Slides
Assignment 3 and CS 659 Research Paper due