(To be co-taught with Charlie Kaufman)

This workshop requires no background other than intellectual curiosity and a good night’s sleep in the recent past, even though it does cover technical content . Included topics:
• Basic cryptographic building blocks; Secret key, public key, and hash algorithms. What they are, what their properties are, and what they are used for.
• How cryptography is used for secure network communication, including encryption, authentication, and integrity protection.
• If Alice and Bob wish to communicate, how do they learn keys for each other?
• How does the widely deployed RSA public key algorithm work? Why does its security depend on the difficulty of factoring large numbers?
• What is blockchain? Why does it consume so much energy? Does it really make things secure?
• What side-channel attacks are, and how to implement to avoid them.
• What is a quantum computer? (Hint: it is not simply a fast classical computer). What kind of problems would it be good at solving?
• How would a quantum computer be able to break the RSA algorithm? We will explain Shor’s algorithm, which, run on a sufficiently large quantum computer, would break our current public key algorithms.
• We will explain some of the new replacement public key algorithms that would not be breakable by a quantum computer (or a classical computer). These algorithms are sometimes known as “postquantum algorithms”