Ciphers and Fundamentals.
Symmetric (Secret) Key. AES, ChaCha20.
Hashing and MAC. MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256.
Asymmetric (Public) Key. RSA and Elliptic Curve.
Key Exchange. Diffie-Hellman, ECDH.
Digital Signatures and Digital Certificates.
Tunnelling. Tunnelling, including SSL/TLS.
Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain. Outline of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoins, Ethereum and more.
Future Cryptography. Outline of areas such as Homomorphic Encryption, Zero-knowledge proofs and Quantum-robust cryptography.
Host security.

The module uses Teams as the main communication channel here. There is also a Teams session each Friday at 6pm.

Module outline

An introduction video is here:

and a Doodle:

We will be using a Ubuntu machine for the practical elements of the module. The VM can either be sourced on vSoC or can be downloaded from here. You can download VMWare Workstation or VMWare Fusion from here. A demo of using the VM is here:

Draft Timetable

The following is the draft timetable:

No	Date	Subject	Lab
2	26 Jan 2026	Ciphers and Fundamentals [Unit]	[Lab] [Demo]
3	2 Feb 2026	Symmetric Key [Unit]	[Lab] Vincent Rijmen
4	9 Feb 2026	Hashing and MAC [Unit]	[Lab] Ivan Damgård
5	16 Feb 2026	Asymmetric (Public) Key [Unit]	[Lab] Len Adleman
6	23 Feb 2026	Key Exchange [Unit]	[Lab] Whitfield Diffie
7	2 Mar 2026	Reading Week (Revision lecture)	Mini-project [Here] /Coursework
8	9 Mar 2026	Digital Signatures and Certificates [Unit]	[Lab ]
9	16 Mar 2026	Test (Units 1-5) 40% of overall mark [Here]
10	23 Mar 2026	Tunnelling [Unit]	[Lab Marty Hellman
11	13 Apr 2026	Blockchain [Unit]	[Lab] Troy Hunt
12	20 Apr 2026	Future Cryptography [Unit]	[Lab]
13	27 Apr 2026	Tokens, Authorization and Docker [Unit]	[Lab]
14	4 May 2026	Coursework Hand-in - 60% of overall mark (Sunday, 11 May 2026) [Coursework]	Daniel J Bernstein