Students must do a theory OR an implementation project which will count towards 20% of their grade in CSCI 284. A short - 2 paragraph - project proposal must be submitted by 1 March, 2004, and projects from outside this list must be approved by the instructor. Such approval must be requested by February 9, 2004.

Implementation projects may be done in groups of two, but theory projects must be done by individuals. Projects will be presented to the class, either as demos or as expositions of papers.

Theory Projects

A. Differential and Linear Cryptanalysis
1. Biham, On Matsui's Linear Cryptanalysis, Proceedings of Eurocrypt'94, LNCS 950

B. Cryptographic Hash Functions
1. Krawczyk, Rabin, ``Chameleon Signatures'', 1997

C. Primes and factoring
1. "PRIMES is in P", Agrawal, Khayal, Saxena
2. Random Primality Testing: Monte Carlo Methods. R. Solovay and V. Strassen. "A fast Monte-Carlo test for primality". SIAM Journal on Computing, vol. 6, pp. 84--85, 1977
3. RSA and Factoring: Factoring and the decryption exponent. J. DeLaurentis. "A Further Weakness in the Common Modulus Protocol for the RSA Cryptoalgorithm". Cryptologia, 8(3), July 1984.

D. Theory of Secrecy
1. Shannon: Entropy and Unicity Distance
2. A. Yao. "Theory and Applications of Trapdoor Functions". In Proceedings of the 23rd Symposium on the Foundation of Computer Science (FOCS), pages 80-91, 1982.
3. S. Goldwasser and S. Micali. "Probabilistic Encryption," Journal of Computer and System Sciences (28), 1984, 270-299
4. Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford: "CAPTCHA: Using Hard AI Problems For Security". Eurocrypt 2003
5. Bennett, C. H., Brassard, G. and Ekert, A. K., "Quantum cryptography", Scientific American, October 1992, pp. 50 - 57.

E. Special Topics
1. Elliptic Curves (from a book, ask instructor)
2. Brands' anonymous credentials - (from book, ask instructor)
3. Encrypted paper receipts for e-voting: Chaum, David, "Secret Ballot Receipts and Transparent Integrity - Better and less-costly electronic voting at polling places"
4. Secret Sharing: Shamir Secret Sharing: A. Shamir, "How to share a secret", Communications of the ACM 22 (1979), 612-613; and short secret sharing: Hugo Krawczyk, "Secret sharing made short". In Advances in Cryptology: Proceedings of Crypto '93, pages 136-143. Springer-Verlag, 1993
5. Secret Computation: T. Sanders and C. Tschudin. Toward mobile cryptography. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 1998. (suggested and taken by a student)

Implementations

A. Ciphers
1. A web-accessible application that encrypts a message using a few classical ciphers.
2. An implementation of Enigma (suggested by a student), and of attacks on it.

B. Cryptanalysis
1. Differential attacks on SPS
2. A web-accessible application for statistical attacks on any cipher

C. Cryptographic Hash Functions
1. Collisions for SHA, MD4, others

D. RSA
1. Attacks: any from Dan Boneh, "Twenty Years of Attacks on the RSA Cryptosystem", Notices of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), Vol. 46, No. 2, pp. 203--213, 1999.
2. Primality testing:

E. Special Topics
1. Elliptic Curves
2. Electronic Cash (Chaum blinding; Brands' anonymous credentials)
3. Electronic Voting (Chaum Encrypted Paper Receipts suggested and taken by a student)
4. Encryption for wireless (Implementation of the WEP protocol suggested and taken by a student; attacks on WEP suggested and taken by a student)
5. Embedded crypto

Last update: 13:15:58, Monday, 01 March, 2004 local time.