B027204 - DATA SECURITY AND PRIVACY

Italian

Network security. Shared key cryptography. Perfect Ciphers according to Shannon, One-Time-Pad, unicity distance. Feistel ciphers. Public-key cryptography. Elements of modular arithmetic. RSA and El Gamal ciphers, the Diffie-Hellman protocol. Cryptographic one-way hash functions. Authentication and digital signature.

Elements of Information Theory and codes.

Privacy. k-anonymity, background knowledge.

1) Michele Boreale. Note per il corso di Codici e Sicurezza.
Available online.

2) Further articles and material will be made available by the instructor.

Knowledge - The course aims at providing students with a thorough understanding of the scientific principles underlying the efficient, reliable and secure transmission of data.

Competence - The students will master the fundamental (mathematical, cryptographic and algorithmic) principles at the heart of data protection and Privacy.

Skills - At the end of the course, students will be capable of building high-level, rigorous models of communication systems. Students will also be capable of analyzing criticalities of communication systems from the point of view of Security.

Familiarity with basic concepts in Algorithms, Programming and Probability Theory.

Lectures.

Office hours:
by appointment.

The exam consists of parts:

1. A project assignment, which may focus either on programming or on theory, centered one one of
the Codes and Data Security topics taught in the course (*); 2. an
oral test.

The project assignment is meant to assess the student's
understanding of Security and Privacy problems, of the
underlying mathematical models and of the cryptographic algorithms, as
seen in class; her/his ability to analyze concrete situations of data and
communication security; her/his ability to apply the acquired
knowledge to the resolution of new problems. It is possible to be
exempted from the project assignment, if submitting solutions to sets of
problems, on both theoretical and practical aspects, as they are
proposed by the teacher during the course.

To access the oral part of the exam, one must have received a
positive evaluation of the project, or have been exempted from it by
submitting solutions to the teacher's problem sets. The oral part of the
exam is meant to assess knowledge of the topics presented in the
course, both at theoretical and at a practical level, mastering
of a technical language which is appropriate to the context,
ability to relate to each other different topics of the program.

The mark reported in the oral part has the greatest impact (70%) on the final mark.

(*) Examples of such project assignments are made available through the e-learning platform.

Network security. Shared key cryptography. Perfect Ciphers according to Shannon, One-Time-Pad, unicity distance. Feistel ciphers. Public-key cryptography. Elements of modular arithmetic. RSA and El Gamal ciphers, the Diffie-Hellman protocol. Cryptographic one-way hash functions. Authentication and digital signature.

Elements of Information Theory. Compression codes: 1st Shannon theorem. Huffman codes. Noisy channels, capacity and error correction codes.

Privacy: k-anonimity, l-diversity, t-closeness. Background information. Differential Privacy.
(*)

Selected in-depth cryptography topics: AES; proof of correctness of Miller-Rabin test; key equivocation and unicity distance; schemes of undeniable signatures. (*)

(*) Not included in 6 CFU courses.