INTRODUCTION TO CRYPTOGRAPHY

Catalog description

Quantitative reasoning intensive course (Q1).This course will provide an introduction to codes and code-breaking for students with little or no mathematical background. At the same time, students taking the course will be introduced to a significant number of central concepts from elementary number theory, including modular arithmetic, power residues, prime factorizations, different number bases, linear congruences, and greatest common divisors. The course will begin with a discussion of the need for cryptography both in the digital age and the remote past. From there we will look at substitution, shift, and Vigenere cypers and how to break them, and then proceed to encryption using congruences and prime numbers. We will examine security issues along the way and study public key encryption and other topics as time allows.