This table shows the intended schedule. However, this is the first time that this course is being offered in an in-person format, and it is possible some of the modules may run slightly longer than planned. For this reason, we have included two "slip days" at the end of term.
| Date | Additional resources / notes |
|---|---|
| Module 1
(Slides) What is Privacy? | |
| Sep 3 | Solove, 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy, 2007 |
| Module 2
(Slides) Background | |
| Sep 5 |
McCullagh, How
Pakistan knocked YouTube offline (and how to make sure it never happens again), 2008
NIST RPKI Monitor, 2025 |
| Sep 10 | |
| Sep 12 | |
| Sep 15 | Assignment 0 due |
| Module 3
(Slides) Privacy in Computation: Distributed Trust | |
| Sep 17 | |
| Sep 19 | |
| Sep 24 | Devet et al., Optimally Robust Private Information Retrieval, 2012 |
| Sep 26 | |
| Sep 29 | Assignment 1 due |
| Oct 1 |
Drijvers et al., On the Security of Two-Round Multi-Signatures, 2019
Komlo and Goldberg, FROST: Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold Signatures, 2020 |
| Module 4
(Draft slides) Privacy in Computation: Trusted Hardware | |
| Oct 3 | |
| Oct 8 | Sasy et al., Fast Fully Oblivious Compaction and Shuffling, 2022 |
| Oct 10 |
Sasy et al., Waks-On/Waks-Off: Fast Oblivious Offline/Online Shuffling and Sorting with Waksman Networks, 2023
Stefanov et al., Path ORAM: An Extremely Simple Oblivious RAM Protocol, 2018 |
| Oct 15 | Reading Week: no class |
| Oct 17 | Reading Week: no class |
| Module 5
(Draft slides) Privacy in Computation: Homomorphic Encryption | |
| Oct 22 | |
| Oct 24 | |
| Oct 29 | Mahdavi and Kerschbaum, Constant-weight PIR: Single-round Keyword PIR via Constant-weight Equality Operators, 2022 |
| Module 6
Privacy in Communication: Protecting Metadata | |
| Oct 31 | |
| Nov 3 | Assignment 2 due |
| Nov 5 | |
| Nov 7 | |
| Nov 12 | |
| Module 7
Privacy in Communication: Censorship Resistance | |
| Nov 14 | |
| Nov 19 | |
| Nov 21 | |
| Nov 26 | Assignment 3 due |
| Slip days
(in case some of the modules run long) | |
| Nov 26 | |
| Nov 28 | |
| Dec 8 | Assignment 4 due |