CS 798—Privacy in Computation and Communication—Fall 2025 Schedule

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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.

DateAdditional 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 (Draft 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
Privacy in Computation: Trusted Hardware
Oct 3
Oct 8
Oct 10
Oct 15 Reading Week: no class
Oct 17 Reading Week: no class
Module 5
Privacy in Computation: Homomorphic Encryption
Oct 22
Oct 24
Oct 29
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