Semester page for TEK4500 - Autumn 2021

Grades for this year's exam should now be available. I've also updated the solution on Canvas with the grading guide. I think there were many good answers this year. Good job everyone!

Thank you to everyone who took the course and especially to everyone who attended the lecture. I hope you had fun and learned a lot.

Stay safe and have a merry Christmas!

H?kon

The solutions for the exam are now up on Canvas.

Hope you all had a fun semester and good luck with your further studies!

The exams from previous years are now available on Canvas. I will go through last year's exam during the recap lecture on Wednesday (Nov. 24). Remember that I will begin this lecture at 11:15. Again, if there's is any topic you want me to repeat or discuss in greater detail, please send me an email or add a note on Padlet (https://uio.padlet.org/hkonjacobsen/aburiblzi24sk1u8).

Also: if you didn't submit your midterm exam, but still think that you should be qualified for the final exam (e.g. if you have taken the course before), please send me an email as soon as possible .

Next week (November 24) I will give a recap lecture for the course, starting 11:15. Currently I have no fixed plans for this lecture, and intend to keep it pretty free-format depending on your wishes. Please use this opportunity to ask about anything that you want me to repeat or clarify. If you already know a topic you would like me to discuss, please send me a request in advance. You can either send me an email directly, but I've also created the following Padlet document were you can post suggestions for the lecture anonymously.

Just a reminder of tomorrow's guest lecture by Martin Strand, researcher at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI). I highly recommend everyone to attend the lecture, which will cover some topics at the bleeding edge of cryptographic research.

Note: there will not be a recitation lecture tomorrow.

Here is a great high-level explanation on Shor's algorithm by the channel minutephysics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvTqbM5Dq4Q

As I mentioned in class, the reduction from factoring to order-finding that I presented in the lecture is oversimplistic and is only meant to give some intuition for the idea. In reality, the actual reduction used inside Shor's algorithm is a little bit more clever and is the one referred to in the video above.
Here is how the actual reduction works. Suppose you are able to find the order r of a mod N. Now we hope that the following two properties are satisfied:

1. r  is even;
2. a^r/2 +1 != 0 mod N and a^r/2 - 1 != 0 mod N (i.e., neither left-hand ...

Good job on the midterm everyone. I think there were a lot of good answers.

I also want to remind everyone to please ensure that you submit answers to at least two weekly problem sets. This is required in order to be eligible for the final exam.

If you have taken the course before and only plan on taking the final exam, then you can just ignore the above.  

Here's a great Numberphile video about random numbers, and how bad we (humans) are at creating them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP-Ipsat90c

Some students requested that the deadlines for the weekly problem sets be moved one day back (i.e. from Tuesdays to Wednesdays) so that the solutions don't have to be delivered until after the recitation hour on that day. I'm happy to make this change, and have now updated the deadlines for all the remaining problem sets correspondingly. 

Unfortunately, the recording of today's lecture (Lecture 4) did not include any audio. Hence, I will not publish it. I'm really sorry about this, but there's unfortunately nothing else I can do. I have been in contact with the IT department to help figure out what caused the issue. Hopefully things will be sorted by next week.

With that said, today's lecture was very similar to last year's Lecture 4 on the same topic (i.e., MACs and integrity, etc.) and this lecture is freely available here (2020) (together with all the other lectures). So if you didn't attend today's lecture in person, please consult last year's recording. Also feel free to send me any questions you might have, either by email or (even better) the discussion page on Canvas.

There was an excellent question regarding exercise 7 in Problem set 1 in today's class. I realized that my proposed solution perhaps was a little bit too short, so I've updated it now.

Lecture 2 is now online. Unfortunately, I ran a little short on time, meaning that I had to skip or rush most of the details concerning implementations of concrete block ciphers, such as DES and AES. Since I don't feel that this gives the topic its deserved justice, I will record an extra segment next week during the recitation hour (provided time permits and there are not too many questions) to also cover DES and AES properly. In the meantime, and in particular for this week's problem set, you will have to consult (e.g. [BR]) for more info on DES and AES.  

The slides for Lecture 1 are now available online and can be found here. The recordings of the lecture is also available, and can be found here. Unfortunately, for some unknown reason, the recording of part 3 failed, so for that you will just have make do with the available slides. 

First lecture: Wednesday 11:15-14:00, August 25, in Smalltalk, Ole-Johan Dahls hus.

All other lectures: Wednesdays 12:15-14:00. Note that only the first lecture starts at 11:15!

Video recordings of the lectures (voice + screen capture) will be available on Canvas after the lectures (registered students only). 

Recitation: Wednesdays 11:15-12:00 in Smalltalk, Ole-Johan Dahls hus. Covers last weeks problem sets and any questions regarding last week's material.

Grading: Final exam counts for 100% of the grade. However, in order to be eligible to take the exam,...