Independent Crypto Course syllabus

The purpose of this course ("Independent Crypto") is to give students an opportunity to dive deeper into interesting topics of Cryptography.

By the end of this course you should grok the following topics:

• Elliptic curve cryptography
• Memory hard functions
• Garbled circuits
• An topic of your choosing (get creative!)

Each of these should take about 40 hours of work to complete. An overview of what that means is outlined below.

Each topic ought to take about 40 hours of work to complete over the course of a 10 week term. If you schedule your time well this will be a piece of cake at just 16 hours per week. That's 2.28 hours per day, 3.2 hours per week-day, or 16 hours the day before your check-in is due!

The basic structure is as follows:

1. Research a topic. Read papers, watch informative videos, ask questions and learn as much as you can about a given topic.
2. Maintain an annotated bibliography. This should include materials found while studying a given topic, a summary of each of the materials, and a final summary of the topic as a whole.
3. Meet weekly with the mentoring professor.
4. Repeat.
5. ???
6. Profit.

The end goal, in addition to learning about a breadth of topics in modern security, is to produce an annotated bibliography. This will exercise the student's ability to read and process academic topics, journals, and videos.

Of course if you are particularly passionate about a topic you are encouraged to go further: implementing things of interest, investigating new questions, and generally 'digging deeper' as you gain interest in different topics.

The following topics do not need to be completed in order, however doing so will result in an optimal 'difficulty curve' as the kids say. The kids do still say that right?