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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
Tuesday, January 5	Introduction-Caesar, Vigenere
Thursday, January 7	classical ciphers- Rectangular transposition, homophonic, Playfair, ADFGVX, snail
Tuesday, January 12		Quiz 1
Thursday, January 14	classical ciphers- Hill, Vernam, probability theory
Tuesday, January 19	probability theory and the game of craps
Thursday, January 21	infinite monkeys	return quiz 1
Tuesday, January 26		Quiz 2
Thursday, January 28	index of coincidence, breaking rectangular transposition
Tuesday February 2	breaking rectangular transposition, breaking vigenere, breaking monoalphabetic substitution
Thursday, February 4	Monty Hall Paradox, breaking ADFGVX, definition of entropy	return quiz 2
Tuesday February 9	More entropy
Thursday, February 11		Quiz 3
Tuesday February 23	entropy and unicity distance
Thursday, February 25	trees
Tuesday March 2	Huffman encoding	return quiz 3
Thursday, March 4		Quiz 4
Tuesday March 9	perfect secrecy, coins
Thursday, March 11	finish perfect secrecy, begin number theory, vernam
Tuesday March 16	number theory and Euler's phi function, RSA system
Thursday, March 18		Quiz 5
Tuesday March 23	primality testing, more RSA, Diffie-Hellman
Thursday, March 25	factoring, discrete log, DH, ElGamal	return Quiz 4
Tuesday March 30	Knapsack, digital signatures, Feistel, DES	return Quiz 5
Thursday, April 1	DES, cyclotomic polynomials and primitive roots, anonymous chatting

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.

:Home:	:Links:	:Handouts:	:Schedule:	:Grades:

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