CS 786 - Fall 2016 - Selected Topics: Applied Cryptography

News:

Class schedule: Tuesday 1:00 - 3:55pm, Sep 06, 2016 - Dec 13, 2016; Room: Cullimore Hall 111

Instructor: Qiang Tang; Email: qiang at njit.edu; Office: GITC 4204; Office hours: by appointment.

Class Overview:
We will explore how to use and design cryptography in various application scenarios, such as cloud computing, cryptocurrencies and big data. We will also explore interesting research questions and how to do research in applied cryptography.

A tentative list of topics includes:

Course Description
The course will involve a substantial amount of reading, presenting research papers, participation in class discussions, and a semester-long research project. Each lecture will focus on a specific topic and will be based on presentations and class discussions.

Presentation: Students are encouraged to work as a team to prepare presentations (based on research papers) and lead the discussion on the respective topic. The students are required to read the assigned papers for each week. In addition, each presenting team is responsible for submitting a report for the papers assigned for that week, which must include: (1) most interesting part and weak points (2) two possible extensions with justification. This report has to be turned in by the weekend before the presentation. The rest of the class is required to submit a report after the presentation.

Course project: Students will work on the course project in teams. There is flexibility on the nature of the project: Both theoretical and system contributions will be appreciated, although all projects should have a clear relation to applied cryptography. The outcome of the project will be in the form of a final report, describing the design/implementation efforts. Students will present their results to the class.

Due to the dynamic nature of this field, there is no one textbook required for this course. Each selected topic will be based on handouts and research papers from recent top conferences and journals.

Prerequisites
Background recommended but not required: Undergraduate-level security or cryptography. We welcome students from non-cryptography areas such as theory, data mining, programming languages and systems to participate and contribute to our discussions.

Grading policy
Participation in class discussion 20%
Paper presentations + Reports 40%
Final project 40%

Weekly schedule
Date Topic Discussion
Leader
Readings
09/06/16 Class overview + Basics Qiang
09/13/16 Digital rights management Qiang
09/20/16 Accountability vs Anonymity Nishan and Gyana Tsang et al. Blacklistable anonymous credential: blocking misbehaving users without ttps
Tsang et al. PEREA: towards practical TTP-free revocation in anonymous authentication
09/27/16 Defend against insiders NiShan and Gyana
10/04/16 Blockchain Consensus Jie and
10/11/16 Consortium Blockchains TBA
10/18/16 Blockchain Applications TBA
10/25/16 Accountability in Blockchain TBA
11/01/16 Search on encrypted data TBA
11/08/16 Proof of Properties TBA
11/15/16 Verifiable Computation
Secure Outsourcing
TBA
11/22/16 Secure Messaging
Differential Privacy
TBA
11/29/16 Adversarial machine learning TBA
12/06/16 Privacy preserving data mining TBA
12/13/16 Final Project Presentation All class

Resource

Academic integrity