Alex Lombardi's Academic Home Page - 6.876 (Fall 2019, MIT)

6.876 Advanced Topics in Cryptography

Cryptographic Proofs (Fall 2019)

Lecturer: Alex Lombardi

Welcome! This is the course homepage for the Fall 2019 iteration of 6.876 (Advanced Topics in Cryptography).

Course Title: Cryptographic Proofs

Location and Time: Friday 1-4pm in Room 36-112

Course Head: Professor Vinod Vaikuntanathan

Course Description: The notion of a cryptographic proof — an interactive process through which you can “prove” that a statement is true while maintaining some level of secrecy and/or efficiency — is central to modern cryptography. We will begin with the classical notion of a zero-knowledge interactive proof and explore the theory surrounding it, including exciting recent work on zero-knowledge and adjacent topics.

Course Requirements

Scribe Notes: Each student should write up scribe notes (in LaTeX) for one lecture. These notes will be posted on the course website.

Reading Project: By the end of the semester, each student should read a paper (or perhaps two related papers) and write an exposition of the results of the paper(s). A list of papers for potential projects is posted below (although you are more than welcome to pick papers that are not on the list).

Schedule

The following schedule is very tentative and subject-to-change. We have included links to relevant articles (as entirely optional readings) associated to every (planned) lecture topic. We will adjust pace and topics based on feedback.

Course Schedule

Final Project Topics

6.876 Fall 2019 Final Project: List of Papers

Inspiration

This course focused on similar topics to those of Nir Bitansky's Spring 2019 seminar on zero-knowledge.

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