D0872 - CRYPTOGRAPHY CHALLENGES FROM HIEROGLYPHS TO LLMS

Conoscenze e abilità da conseguire

** PLEASE NOTE THE WHOLE PAGE IS A DRAFT - TO BE FINALIZED BY SEPTEMBER 7 **

In this seminar, students acquire a foundational knowledge of how cryptography works, through a chronological exploration that will allow them to connect its role to many disciplines besides science and technology:

how it was (and is) influenced by politics and society, and impacted on them in turn;

how it is related to human thinking through language and philosophy;

how the current developments are casting hard challenges to its effectiveness and what this could mean for society.

Programma/Contenuti

What is a secret? From hieroglyphs to the first ciphers

A (shallow) dive in archaeology & linguistics

• Steganography vs. encoding vs. encryption vs. decipherment;
• The building blocks of information hiding: substitution and transposition
• The first implementations

The 2000-year-long race between designing and breaking ciphers

Crypto walks hand in hand with history, from ancient to modern

• The methods of cryptanalysis
• Monoalphabetic ciphers and frequency analysis
• The polyalphabetic cipher and studies on entropy of language

Mechanization and the dawn of the computer age

War changes the face of computation, and brings philosophy and ethics to the table

• Rotor machines, Enigma
• Turing: how codebreaking birthed computer science, among tough choices and bitter ends
• Shannon's information theory and the unbreakable one-time pad

The public-key revolution: from protecting secrets to trusting strangers

Also: crypto gets the attention of international regulators and policymakers

• The key-distribution problem;
• One-way functions and the number theory beneath them;
• Diffie–Hellman & RSA, digital signatures.

Cryptography that runs our world

Economics, and a touch of epistemology

• Hash functions, symmetric AES
• What actually happens when you open an HTTPS page
• Trust without trustees: zero-knowledge proofs, secure multiparty computation, blockchain/cryptocurrencies.

The age of quantum computing and LLMs

What lies ahead between physics and philosophy

• The quantum threat: Shor's algorithm; post-quantum crypto
• Quantum helping crypto: key distribution
• LLMs woes: empowering cryptanalysis, posing intrinsic threats to privacy, expanding the attack surface, and inducing the deepfake-driven crisis of authenticity

Testi/Bibliografia

A few essential readings will be published soon, more links to detailed sources will be available on Virtuale in connection to the corresponding teaching materials.

Metodi didattici

Lectures, supported by slides and possibly multimedia contents.

A running example spanning the three meetings, proposing students to solve a cipher challenge, collecting shards along the course to reach the final goal.

Modalità di verifica dell'apprendimento

Students will choose one of the aspects presented during the seminar, in agreement with the instructor, and prepare a report or slideshow illustrating their in-depth analysis of the chosen topic.

It is possible for students to work either individually or in small groups (3 people max); in the latter case, the individual contribution of each group member to the final result must be clearly outlined.

The contents are to be exposed in a short presentation, preferably in front of the whole class.

The grading is pass/fail.

Strumenti a supporto della didattica

Slide handouts

Links to online tools

Orario di ricevimento

Consulta il sito web di Marco Prandini