Introduction to Applied Cryptography

CS 470 is about how we actually build security guarantees from mathematics, turning hard problems in number theory, discrete probability, and lattices into protocols you can trust to encrypt, authenticate, and prove things without leaking them. You'll work through three homeworks, five quizzes, and written exams that push you to reason about constructions like RSA, ECDH, TLS 1.3, and post-quantum schemes, plus the side-channel attacks that break naive implementations. It sits where theoretical CS meets real systems, so it's the natural bridge from your discrete math and algorithms background to anything serious in security, blockchains, or privacy-preserving computation.