Introduction to Applied Cryptography

Cryptography here is treated as the engineering discipline of building protocols that remain secure under precise, adversarial assumptions, so the course moves from the math underneath block ciphers and RSA up through what actually runs on the wire today: TLS 1.3, ECDSA, and the lattice-based schemes replacing them for the post-quantum era. You work through three homeworks, five quizzes, and a written midterm and final, with Katz-Lindell and Boneh-Shoup as the reference texts. Expect to reason about side-channel leakage and the constructions behind zero-knowledge proofs and MPC, which is why this is the prerequisite worth having before touching anything in blockchain, secure systems, or applied security research.