CSc 85030: Modern Cryptography

Term Paper

[ Report | Presentation | Candidate Papers]

The coursework for this class includes a term paper. To complete this requirement, you should pick a topic, read some paper(s) on it, prepare a report, and deliver a 20 minutes presentation about it. A list of suggested papers is provided below, but you are welcome to propose other papers and topics. To avoid overlap in your choices, you should discuss your choice of papers with me first: please schedule an appointment with me via email or before/after class.

Report

The report should take the form of a written survey (preferably prepared with LaTeX). The report should be understandable and well-written. It should follow a paper-like format (e.g., abstract, introduction, main contributions, conclusions). The quality of writing in the report influences your grade.

Presentation

Your 20-minutes presentation (preferably prepared with PowerPoint; no black-board) should present a summary of the main contribution of your selected paper. Everybody enrolled in this class must attend everybody else's presentation (failing to participate will affect your final grade). Do your best to ensure that your talk is both understandable and informative, in the sense that everybody in the class should learn about the contributions of the paper your are presenting.

List of Candidate Papers (in chronological order)

Dan Boneh and Matthew Franklin,
An efficient public key traitor tracing scheme, 1999.
Dan Boneh, Antoine Joux, and Phong Q. Nguyen,
Why Textbook ElGamal and RSA Encryption are Insecure, 2000. TAKEN!
Ronald Cramer and Victor Shoup,
Signature schemes based on the Strong RSA Assumption, 2000. TAKEN!
Victor Shoup,
Practical threshold signatures, 2000.
Dalit Naor, Moni Naor and Jeff Lotspiech,
Revocation and Tracing Schemes for Stateless Receivers, 2001.
Ronald Cramer and Victor Shoup,
Design and analysis of practical public-key encryption schemes secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack, 2003.
Anna Lysyanskaya, Silvio Micali, Leonid Reyzin, and Hovav Shacham,
Sequential Aggregate Signatures from Trapdoor Permutations, 2004.
Yevgeniy Dodis and Tal Rabin,
Cryptography and Game Theory, 2007. TAKEN!
Nicholas Hopper, Luis von Ahn, and John Langford,
Provably Secure Steganography, 2009. TAKEN!
Tal Moran, Moni Naor and Gil Segev,
An Optimally Fair Coin Toss, 2009.