Universität Wien
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052013 VU Foundations of Cryptography (2025S)

3.00 ECTS (2.00 SWS), SPL 5 - Informatik und Wirtschaftsinformatik
Continuous assessment of course work
Moodle

Registration/Deregistration

Note: The time of your registration within the registration period has no effect on the allocation of places (no first come, first served).

Details

max. 25 participants
Language: English

Lecturers

Classes (iCal) - next class is marked with N

  • Monday 03.03. 11:30 - 13:00 Hörsaal 3, Währinger Straße 29 3.OG
  • Monday 10.03. 11:30 - 13:00 Hörsaal 3, Währinger Straße 29 3.OG
  • Monday 17.03. 11:30 - 13:00 Hörsaal 3, Währinger Straße 29 3.OG
  • Monday 24.03. 11:30 - 12:15 Seminarraum 11, Währinger Straße 29 2.OG
  • Monday 24.03. 11:30 - 13:00 Hörsaal 3, Währinger Straße 29 3.OG
  • Monday 31.03. 11:30 - 13:00 Hörsaal 3, Währinger Straße 29 3.OG
  • Monday 07.04. 11:30 - 13:00 Hörsaal 3, Währinger Straße 29 3.OG
  • Monday 28.04. 11:30 - 13:00 Hörsaal 3, Währinger Straße 29 3.OG
  • Monday 05.05. 11:30 - 13:00 Hörsaal 3, Währinger Straße 29 3.OG
  • Monday 12.05. 11:30 - 13:00 Hörsaal 3, Währinger Straße 29 3.OG
  • Monday 19.05. 11:30 - 13:00 Hörsaal 3, Währinger Straße 29 3.OG
  • Monday 26.05. 11:30 - 13:00 Hörsaal 3, Währinger Straße 29 3.OG
  • Monday 02.06. 11:30 - 13:00 Hörsaal 3, Währinger Straße 29 3.OG
  • Monday 16.06. 11:30 - 13:00 Hörsaal 3, Währinger Straße 29 3.OG
  • Monday 23.06. 11:30 - 13:00 Hörsaal 3, Währinger Straße 29 3.OG
  • Monday 30.06. 11:30 - 13:00 Hörsaal 3, Währinger Straße 29 3.OG
    Seminarraum 10, Währinger Straße 29 2.OG
  • Monday 08.09. 09:45 - 11:15 Hörsaal 3, Währinger Straße 29 3.OG

Information

Aims, contents and method of the course

The goal of this course is to understand fundamental principles of modern cryptography. How do
we define security of cryptographic primitives? What do we mean by provable security and how
does a security proof look like? How can we instantiate provably secure cryptographic primitives?
These questions will be answered and classical cryptographic constructions will be discussed in
this course.

Contents:
- introduction: historical ciphers, principles of modern cryptography, perfectly secret encryption
- private-key cryptography: symmetric encryption, message authentication codes, hash functions
- public-key cryptography: asymmetric encryption, digital signatures

The course will be taught using slides for the lecture part as well as blackboard presentation during
the exercise sessions. Overall, the course consists of 75% lectures and 25% exercise sessions. We
will give homework exercises and strongly recommend to solve them independently. We will
provide solutions for those exercises and discuss some of them during exercise sessions.
Furthermore there will be practical exercises that can be solved to gain bonus points.

This course focuses on the theoretical foundations of cryptography and requires basic knowledge in
discrete mathematics and probability theory.

Assessment and permitted materials

There will be a written exam at the end of the course (June 30, 2025), a further retake exam
will be offered in September. The exam takes 90 minutes. The examination topics comprise the entire contents of
the lecture. Students will be required to apply the concepts seen in the course. No lecture notes or
other helping materials are permitted. The exam comprises 70 points.

During the semester there will be three short test exams. These take 30 minutes, follow the same
rules as the final exam and will be executed at the beginning of the lecture in weeks 4 (March 24,
2025), week 7 (April 28, 2025), and week 12 (June 2, 2025). The best two among the exams are counted and comprise 30 points in total (15 points each). You can but don't have to take all three exams, therefore there won't be retake exams.

Furthermore, there will be three coding challenges that can be solved online independently and
give up to 24 bonus points in total (8 points each).

Minimum requirements and assessment criteria

For a passing grade an overall score of 50 points is required. The students will be required to
understand the concepts taught in the course and apply them.

Grading: S>=85: 1, 85>S>=70: 2, 70>S>=60: 3, 60>S>=50: 4, 50>S: 5

Examination topics

All the topics discussed in the course are examinable.

Reading list

This lecture is based on the following textbook.
- J. Katz, Y. Lindell: “Introduction to Modern Cryptography”, 3rd edition, CRC Press, 2021

Association in the course directory

Last modified: Tu 08.04.2025 11:46