IIIT Bangalore Offers Free Online Course on Cryptography: Check Details

IIIT Bangalore is currently offering a free online course on foundations of cryptography on NPTEL for students interested to understand the current cryptography research papers and standards. While the course is aimed at science and mathematics students, it is free for all students and professionals to enroll similar to all other courses being offered on NPTEL.

The course will be conducted by Dr Ashish Choudhury who is currently an associate professor at IIIT Bangalore. He has done his MS and PhD in computer science from IIT Madras, followed by post-doc at ISI Kolkata and the University of Bristol. His research interests are centered on the foundation of cryptographic protocols for real-world problems.

What Students Will Learn in the IIIT Bangalore Free Online Course on Cryptography

The course, over a period of 12 weeks, aims at equipping learners with the basic paradigm and principles of modern cryptography, Learners will be introduced to definitions, constructions of various cryptographic objects, security properties that are desirable in such objects, how to design objects that satisfy the definitions, and so on through the following topics:

• Course Overview, Symmetric-key Encryption, Historical Ciphers, Perfect Security and Its Limitations.
• Computational Security, Semantic Security and Pseudorandom Generators (PRGs).
• Stream Ciphers, Provably-secure Instantiation of PRG, Practical Instantiation of PRG, CPA-security and Pseudo-random Functions (PRFs).
• CPA-Secure Ciphers from PRF, Modes of Operations of Block Ciphers, Theoretical Constructions of Block Ciphers and Practical Constructions of Block Ciphers.
• DES, AES and Message Authentication Codes (MAC).
• Information-theoretic Secure MAC, Cryptographic Hash Functions, Ideal-Cipher Model, Davies-Meyer construction and Merkle-Damgård Paradigm.
• Birthday Attacks on Cryptographic Hash Functions, Applications of Hash Functions, Random Oracle Model and Authenticated Encryption.
• Generic Constructions of Authenticated Encryption Schemes, Key-exchange Problem, One-way Trapdoor Functions and Cyclic Groups, and so on.

How to Enroll and Certificate from IIIT Bangalore

Interested participants will need to apply on the NPTEL website before 25 January 2021. The course will begin from 18 January 2021 and will go on until 9 April 2021. Like every other course on NPTEL, to obtain certificates with logos of IIIT Bangalore and NPTEL, participants will have to pay an amount of Rs 1000 and take an examination on 24 April 2021. Those who wish to know more about the free online course are advised to go through the official website for more information.