Practical Cryptography

This course takes a systems-oriented approach to modern applied cryptography, focusing on the primitives and protocols that secure real-world deployed systems. Rather than fully treating cryptographic constructions in isolation, the course will examine how they are combined, deployed, and sometimes broken in practice. 

Topics will include privacy in deployed systems, network protocols and the concrete security properties they guarantee, zero-knowledge proofs for attestation and verification (including proving correct parsing, digital credentials, and statements about private data), private information retrieval (PIR) and its role in privacy-preserving services, and complex authentication mechanisms that compose multiple cryptographic tools into a single system. 

Throughout the course, the emphasis will be applied: for each technique we ask what its security goals are, how those goals can fail, and which design choices matter when moving from theory to a working, attackable system. The course is intended to give students a working understanding of the cryptographic building blocks behind contemporary privacy and security infrastructure, and a way to reason about their guarantees and limitations in deployment. 

• Privacy in deployed systems,
• Network protocols and which properties they provide,
• Zero-knowledge proofs for attestation and verification in real systems: proving parsing, digital credentials, proving 
  statements.
• Private information retrieval (PIR) as used in privacy-preserving services,
• Complex authentication mechanisms that combine multiple cryptographic tools.