Abstract

This is a set of lecture notes on cryptography compiled for 6.87s, a one week long course on cryptography taught at MIT by Shafi Goldwasser and Mihir Bellare in the summers of 1996–2001. The notes were formed by merging notes written for Shafi Goldwasser’s Cryptography and Cryptanalysis course at MIT with notes written for Mihir Bellare’s Cryptography and network security course at UCSD. In addition, Rosario Gennaro (as Teaching Assistant for the course in 1996) contributed Section 9.6, Section 11.4, Section 11.5, and Appendix D to the notes, and also compiled, from various sources, some of the problems in Appendix E. Cryptography is of course a vast subject. The thread followed by these notes is to develop and explain the notion of provable security and its usage for the design of secure protocols. Much of the material in Chapters 2, 3 and 7 is a result of scribe notes, originally taken by MIT graduate students who attended Professor Goldwasser’s Cryptography and Cryptanalysis course over the years, and later edited by Frank D’Ippolito who was a teaching assistant for the course in 1991. Frank also contributed much of the advanced number theoretic material in the Appendix. Some of the material in Chapter 3 is from the chapter on Cryptography, by R. Rivest, in the Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science. Chapters 4, 5, 6, 8 and 10, and Sections 9.5 and 7.4.6, were written by Professor Bellare for his Cryptography and network security course at UCSD.

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