The course deals with the underlying principles of cryptography and network security. It develops the mathematical tools required to understand the topic of cryptography.
Starting from the classical ciphers to modern day ciphers, the course provides an extensive coverage of the techniques and methods needed for the proper functioning of the ciphers.
The course deals with the construction and cryptanalysis of block ciphers, stream ciphers and hash functions.
The course defines one way functions and trap-door functions and presents the construction and cryptanalysis of public key ciphers, namely RSA.
The key exchange problem and solutions using the Diffie-Hellman algorithm are discussed. Message Authentication Codes (MAC) and signature schemes are also detailed.
The course deals with modern trends in asymmetric key cryptography, namely using Elliptic Curves. The course concludes with the design rationale of network protocols for key exchange and attacks on such protocols.