appliedcrypto/unit00_introduction/README.md

Unit 0: Introduction

Units

The units involved in the module are:

• 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.
• Trust 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 Slack as the main communication channel and which can be accessed here. There is also a WebEx session each Monday at 6:30pm.

Module outline

An introduction video is here:

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
1	17 Jan 2020	Ciphers and Fundamentals Unit	Lab [Link] Demo [Link]
2	24 Jan 2020	Symmetric Key Unit	Lab [Link] Demo [Link]
3	31 Jan 2020	Hashing and MAC Unit	Lab [Link]
4	7 Feb 2020	Asymmetric (Public) Key Unit	Lab [Link]
5	14 Feb 2020	Key Exchange Unit	Lab [Link]
6	21 Feb 2020	Guest lecture	Mini-project/Coursework [Link]
7	28 Feb 2020	Trust and Digital Certificates Unit	Lab [Link]
8	6 Mar 2020	Tunnelling Unit	Lab [Link]
9	13 Mar 2020	Test 1 (Units 1-5) [Study guide]
10	20 Mar 2020	Blockchain Unit	Lab [Link]
11	27 Mar 2020	Future Cryptography Unit	Lab [Link]
12	3 April 2020	Tokens, Authorization and Docker Unit	Lab [Link]
13	10 April 2020	Trusted Hosts Unit
Easter Break
14	Week beginning 27 April 2020 (TBC)	Test 2 (Units 6-10)
15	Week beginning 4 May 2020 (TBC)	Coursework Hand-in [Draft]

Any questions, contact us on Slack?