###EE 720 – AN INTRODUCTION TO NUMBER THEORY AND CRYPTOGRAPHY

Year for which the review is written:

2014-15 Spring

Professor who took the course

Prof. Virendra Sule

Motivation behind the course

We use cryptography in many areas like secure banking transactions, emails, etc. If you want to know to about what are current schemes used for encryption and decryption, you should take up this course. This course will introduce you to basics of number theory and cryptography. Course Content

Professor initially taught basics of number theory. Number theory has lot of applications in cryptography. Then he discussed about many encryption and decryption schemes ranging from Caesar’s cipher(ancient) to RSA(currently used). He discussed basics of designing block cipher and stream cipher. Preofessor, discussed about difficulty of discrete log problem, factorisation of large numbers. Its because of computationally difficulty to find discrete log or factorisation of large numbers, we are able to break RSA or El-Gammal schemes. Overall course was interesting and gives you glimpse of how modern world cryptography is useful. Pre-requisite

There is no pre-requisite for this course. Feedback on lectures, assignments, tutorials and exams:

Attendance policy was very lenient. Therefore, many people didn’t attend the lectures. The course would become very easy if you regularly attend the lectures as Professors solves multiple questions/ numericals in the class and it really helps in the exams. No quizzes were conducted in the course. Only midsem and endsem exams were conducted with weight age 30% and 50%. 20% weightage was given to the project. Project was supposed to be done in groups 7-8 and required less effort due to large number of students in each group.

Difficulty level :

Easy Grading

Easy (Grading statistics are very good every year)

AA 13

AB 27

BB 43

BC 47

CC 22

AU 1

DD 12

FF 3

FR 12

II 6

TOTAL 186

Reviewed By: Sukanya Patil sukanyapatil1993@gmail.com