CS 7880 - Special Topics in Cryptography, Fall 2020

Course Description

The course will cover various advanced topics in cryptography, at the forefront of current research. One of the main themes will be secure computation over encrypted data, but we will explore other topics as well.

Logistic: Tuesdays 12- 1:40, Thursdays 2:50 - 4:30 pm

Online over Zoom.

Prerequisites: We will assume basic knowledge of crypto at the level of an undergrad crypto course. For example, we assume students have familiarity with one way functions, symmetric and public key encryption, reduction-based proofs of security. If you are unfamiliar with some of these topics, it may still be possible to take the course with some additional self-learning to catch up.

Grading

Each registered student needs to prepare one lecture for the course.
Discuss with the instructor to come up with a topic and the paper(s) to cover for the lecture.

Preliminary List of Topics

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE): Learning with Errors, Regev encryption, Gentry-Sahai-Waters cryptosystem.
Fully Homomorphic Signatures, Attribute-Based Encryption, Multi-Key FHE
Homomorphic Secret Sharing
Garbled Circuits, Functional Encryption, Laconic Function Evaluation
Obfuscation: Definitions, Negative Results, Applications, Connection to Functional Encryption, Compute-and-Compare Obfuscation, Recent iO Constructions.
Oblivious RAM: constructions and lower bounds, Garbled RAM, Doubly Efficient PIR
Verifiable Computations, Succinct Non-interactive arguments (SNARGs), Non-interactive zero knowledge (NIZKs)

Lectures

Class/Date	Topic Covered	Resources	Video, Notes
9/15/20	Learning with Errors (LWE), Regev Encryption	MIT Course Notes	video
9/17/20	Fully Homomorphic Encryption from Ground Up	Eurocrypt19 Talk	video, notes
9/22/20	Gentry-Sahai-Waters (GSW) FHE	MIT Couse Notes, Simons Video	video, notes
9/24/20	Bootstrapping, Fully Homomorphic Signatures	paper 1, paper 2	video1,video2, notes, slides
9/29/20	Attribute-Based Encryption (Part 1)	paper	video, notes
10/2/20	Attribute-Based Encryption (Part 2)		video, notes
10/6/20	Functional Encryption and Garbled Circuits	GC notes	video, notes
10/8/20	Succinct FE and Laconic Function Evaluation	Succinct FE, LFE	video, notes slides
10/13/20	Multi-Key FHE	Multi-Key FHE, Spooky FHE	video,slides
10/15/20	Function Secret Sharing (Distributed Point Functions, 2-Server PIR)	paper	video, notes
10/20/20	Homomorphic Secret Sharing from DDH	paper	video, notes
10/22/20	Correlation Generators from LPN	paper	video, notes
10/27/20	Obfuscation (Definitions, Applications)		video , notes
10/29/20	Compute-and-Compare Obfuscation	paper	video, slides
10/30/20	(Special Date) MIT Seminar on candidate IO from LWE sampling	paper	video
11/3/20	No Class, GO VOTE.
11/5/20	IO from Functional Enc and XIO	LPST1 LPST2 BV BNPW	video, notes
11/10/20	ORAM	hierarchical ORAM, path ORAM	video, notes
11/12/20	ORAM Lower Bound	paper	video, notes
11/17/20	No Class (TCC)
11/19/20	Doubly Efficient PIR	paper1, paper2, FHE for RAM	video, notes
11/24/20	Cryptography from Anonymity	paper	video, slides
11/26/20	No Class (Thanksgiving)
12/1/20	Proofs of Sequential Work and Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs)	paper1 paper2 paper3	video
12/3/20	Efficient MPC via SPDZ	paper	video
12/8/20	Laconic OT and IBE from Diffie-Hellman	paper	video
12/10/20	Simons Workshop on Obfuscation		link

Suggested Projects

Attribute-Based Encryption for Circuits: paper
Homomorphic Secret Sharing: construction, foundations
Succinct Functional Encryption + Reusable Garbled Circuits: paper
Obfuscation from Functional Encryption: paper
ORAM Lower Bound: paper
Doubly Efficient PIR paper1,paper2

Resources

The following textbook is useful as a reference: Simons Workshop
Introduction to Modern Cryptography by Katz and Lindell.
Other useful resources include:
Graduate Crypto Book by Dan Boneh and Victor Shoup.
Lecture Notes by Rafael Pass and Abhi Shelat.
Lecture notes by Yevgeniy Dodis
Lecture notes by Chris Peikert
Lecture notes by Boaz Barak.
Slides by Stefan Dziembowski.
Slides,Notes by Gil Segev.