Introduction

This page contains pointers to some reference material for the 2008 Information Technology Enhancement Program for gifted students course Decrypting Historical Ciphers.  Program leaders are Professors Cunsheng Ding and Mordecai Golin

Class Handouts

1. Date: April 12, 2008:  Introduction & History
   • Introduction
   • History_Part I  (PPT)  (PDF)
   • History Part II  (PPT)  (PDF)
   • Extra Material:  NSA History of how the Enigma was broken
      
2. Date:  May 31, 2008
   Time:  9-11:30 AM
   Venue: Room 3530 (take lifts 25-26 to the 3rd floor & turn right after exiting double doors)
   Part 1 of the lecture is  an intro to ciphers;  part 2 describes the RSA algorithm
   • Introduction to Ciphers (Postscript)  (PDF)
   • An Introduction to RSA  (PostScript)
   • Public Key Cryptography (from Kurose & Ross, 3rd ed) (PPT) (PDF)
   • Frequency table for English letters, digraphs and trigraphs (PS) (PDF)
     (from Lewand 2000)
      
3. Date: June 21, 2008
   Time:  9-11:30 AM
   Venue: Room 3530 (take lifts 25-26 to the 3rd floor & turn right after exiting double doors)
   • More monoalphabetic ciphers (PPT)  (PDF)
   • An introduction to polyalphabetic ciphers (Postscript) (PDF)
      For more on how to break Vigenere ciphers see, e.g.,  Lewand or Spillman (Spillman's CAP web page: for Vigenere ciphere see notes on part 2)
      
4. Date: TBA
   Time: TBA
   Venue: TBA
   • Breaking Classical Ciphers (PPT) 

Useful Links

• Crypto Club
  http://cryptoclub.math.uic.edu/indexmain.html
   
• COMP170 Class notes
  (Lectures 4-6 on introductory modulo arithmetic and cryptography)
  

Bibliographic Material

None of these books are "required" for the course but
some of them might be quoted in the lectures.

1. Ronald L. Graham, Donald E. Knuth & Oren Patashnik
   Concrete Mathematics (2nd ed)
   Addison-Wesley, 1994
   Good introduction to the basic number theory used in cryptography
    
2. James F. Kurose & Keith W. Ross
   Computer Networking (3rd ed)
   Addison-Wesley, 2005
   Has a nice description of how public-key cryptography is used for computer-network security
    
3. Robert Edward Lewand
   Cryptological Mathematics
   The Mathematical Association of America, 2000
   A lot of our "introduction to cipher" material came from this book
    
4. Simon Singh
   The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
   Anchor Press, 2000
   A good popular history of coding theory
    
5. Richard J. Spillman
   Classical and Contemporary Cryptology
   Pearson Prentice Hall 2005
   Comes with very good cipher-breaking code
    

Last updated  06/22/2008 by Mordecai Golin
In case of questions please send email to golin@cs.ust.hk