Document Excerpts:

This document functions as notes for course CSE 207: Modern Cryptography at Computer Science and Engineering, University of California.

This course is an introduction to modern cryptography as a science. The viewpoint in this course is "theory brought to practice", specifically the application of the theory of "provable-security" to the design and analysis of real world cryptographic schemes. This course considers tasks like encryption, signatures, authentication, and key distribution. The goal is to instill understanding of fundamentals of cryptographic protocol design.

Although the aim is to end up with practical solutions, the work involved is largely theoretical. This document will spend much of its time understanding how to formally define and model various goals, and prove correct protocols for these goals. This document is not about computer security. It will not be covering topics like operating systems security, viruses, and worms.

Intended Audience:

This document assumes that readers are familiar with computer algorithms, probability theory, randomized algorithms, some basic complexity theory (eg. P, NP, NP-completeness, reducibility between problems) and, most importantly, own general "mathematical maturity." The latter means being comfortable with mathematical definitions and proofs.