Cryptology II: Assignment topics

General description

The written assignment gives 50% of the final grade. Each student gets his or her topic and must write 6-10 pages long research report about the topic. The report should be self-contained, i.e., any other course participant should understand it without consulting the original sources. I grade both readability and mathematical precision. I ignore all grammar mistakes in the text, as long as they do not make the text unreadable. A good readability is assured by well structured presentation and natural exposition of the problem. A consistent and easily memorable notation is certainly a good start. Mathematical precision is mainly correctness of proofs and definitions. The proofs should be without gaps and glitches.

Depending on the topic, the report can be either fully referative or contain some new results. In both cases, the results should be proved in the exact security framework, i.e., all security guarantees must be stated in explicit (t,e)-language.

The preferable structure of the report is following.

1. Introduction. Basic description of the problem and motivation why is it interesting at all.
2. Cryptographic preliminaries. Description of all preliminary results that are used in further sections. For example, basic definitions and common notation.
3. Main result/Main techniques. The most important result presented in the report.
4. Proofs. All technical details that are necessary for self-containment, but break the normal flow.
5. References. A list of papers that are either used in the report or otherwise relevant.

Of course, the presentation might be completely different if the latter improves readability.