An Experience Teaching a Graduate Course in Cryptography

This article describes an experience of teaching a graduate-level course in cryptography and computer security at New York University. The course content as well as lessons learned and plans for the future are discussed. 1 Introduction This paper describes a course titled "Cryptography and Computer Security" that was taught at New York University in the Fall of 1995. The department head at NYU requested a course for practitioners, with an emphasis on applications and real-world problems. Thus, there were four phases to the course, classical cryptography, conventional cipher systems, applications of cryptography, and number theory. Grading was based on five homework sets and a semester project. The course used Bruce Schneier's book, Applied Cryptography [38] as the primary text, which was supplemented by a course pack of selected publications. In addition, materials were used from the following books: Doug Stinson's, Cryptography: Theory and Practice [41], Dorothy Denning's Cryptograph..