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Below is a rough schedule of how I expect this class to proceed and important dates.  You can expect to see this schedule revised as the course develops. You are expected to show up for lectures and be aware of any changes to the tentative schedule that I am providing for you here.

Lecture Schedule	Topics	Remarks
Thursday, March 5	Introduction-Caesar, Vigenere
Tuesday, March 10	classical ciphers- Rectangular transposition, homophonic, Playfair
Thursday, March 12		Quiz 1
Tuesday, March 17	classical ciphers- Hill, Vernam, ADFGVX, snail	return quiz 1
Thursday, March 19	probability theory and the game of craps
Tuesday, March 24	the game of craps
Thursday, March 26		Quiz 2
Tuesday, March 31	infinite monkeys, index of coincidence	return quiz 2
Thursday, April 2	breaking vigenere, breaking rectangular transposition
Tuesday, April 7	Monty Hall Paradox, breaking monoalphabetic substitution, definition of entropy
Thursday, April 9	Entropy experiment, introduction to entropy
Tuesday, April 14		Quiz 3
Thrusday, April 16	Entropy and unicity distance
Tuesday, April 21	Unicity distance and perfect secrecy	return quiz 3
Thursday, April 23	perfect secrecy, trees and codes
Tuesday, April 28	computer assignment due	Quiz 4
Thursday, April 30	trees and codes, decision trees
Tuesday, May 5	eucliden algorithm, a^b mod m
Thursday, May 7	Euler-Fermat, primality testing, RSA
Tuesday, May 12		Quiz 5 return quiz 4
Thursday, May 14	More RSA, Jacobi-Legendre symbols, Factoring (quadratic seive)
Tuesday, May 19	Diffie Hellman, Feistel cypher, DES, knapsack
Friday, May 29	Final exam 7-10pm	in SLH E

The grade for this course will be based on three components listed on the grades page.  The final grade will be curved and will not be based on the absolute system of reference.

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The following is a list of main topics that we covered from my schedule when I taught the class last year. You can expect that we follow this list in roughly the same order.

Introduction
Classical ciphers
     Caesar
     Vigenere
     Rectangular transposition
     homophonic
     Playfair
     Hill
     Vernam
     ADFGVX
     snail
     Morse code
probability theory
the game of craps
infinite monkeys
probability and vigenere
probability and rectangular transposition
index of coincidence
breaking monoalphabetic substitution
Introduction to entropy
Entropy
unicity distance
trees and file compression
number theory
gcd
solving ax=b (mod n)
computing a^b (mod n)
Euler-Fermat theorem
RSA
primality testing
factorization
discrete log
Diffie-Hellman
Knapsack
DES
Feistel cyphers