Secure Systems from Decentralized Trust

Course Schedule

The list of readings are subject to change as we proceed into the semester.

Date Topic and Readings
End-to-End Encryption
Wednesday, August 24

Course Overview (Raluca)

Friday, August 26

End-to-End encryption (Raluca)

Readings: (questions, answers)

Wednesday, August 31

Man-in-the-middle attacks, PKI, Merkle trees (Raluca)

Readings: (questions, answers)

Transparency Logs
Friday, September 2

Certificate transparency (Chris Thompson, Google)

Required readings: (questions, answers)

Presenter readings:

Optional readings:

Wednesday, September 7

Key transparency for end users and applications to end-to-end encryption (Raluca)

Required readings: (questions, answers)

Presenter readings:

Anonymous Messaging
Friday, September 9

Anonymous messaging I (Emma)

Required readings: (questions)

Presenter readings:

Wednesday, September 14

Anonymous messaging II (Emma)

Required readings: (questions, answers)

Presenter readings:

Encrypted search
Friday, September 16

Encrypted search I (Emma)

Required readings: (questions, answers)

Presenter readings:

Wednesday, September 21

Encrypted search II (Raluca)

Required readings: (questions, answers)

Presenter readings:

Blockchain
Friday, September 23

Basics: Bitcoin (Raluca)

Final Project Proposals due

Required readings (questions, answers):

Wednesday, September 28

Ethereum and smart contracts (Raluca)

Required readings (questions, answers):

Friday, September 30

Algorand (Jing Chen, Algorand Chief Scientist)

Required readings (questions, answers):

Presenter readings:

Wednesday, October 5

Zero-knowledge proofs (Emma)

Required readings (questions, answers):

Presenter readings:

Optional readings:

Friday, October 7

Rollups (Weikeng Chen, DZK CTO, Discreet Labs Chief Scientist)

Required readings (questions, answers):

Presenter readings:

Wednesday, October 12

Zero-knowledge smart contracts (Howard Wu, Aleo CEO)

Required readings (questions, answers):

Friday, October 14

Web3

Required readings (questions, answers):

Optional readings:

Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC)
Wednesday, October 19

Introduction to MPC (Emma)

Required readings (questions, answers):

Presenter readings:

Friday, October 21

Systems aspects of MPC (Sam Kumar)

Required readings (questions, answers):

Presenter readings:

Authentication with Distributed Trust
Wednesday, October 26

Cryptocurrency wallets (Nikos Makriyannis, Fireblocks)

Required readings (questions, answers):

Presenter readings:

Friday, October 28

Backdoor-resilient authentication (Emma)

Required readings (questions):

Presenter readings:

Analytics/Learning with Distributed Trust
Wednesday, November 2

Privacy-preserving computation of aggregate statistics with Prio (Emma & Tim Geoghegan, ISRG)

Required readings (questions, answers):

Optional reading:

Friday, November 4

Applications of MPC (James Reyes and Daniel Masny, Meta)

No reading!

Presenter readings:

Wednesday, November 9

Federated Learning (Mayank)

Required readings: (questions, answers)

Wednesday, November 16

Securing untrusted storage with distributed trust (Raluca)

Required readings (no reading questions):

Friday, November 18 Final presentations
Wednesday, November 30 Final presentations
Friday, December 2 Final presentations
Monday, December 12 Final projects due end of day