Fall 2022
UC Berkeley
This graduate seminar focuses on the development of secure systems built from decentralized trust, including end-to-end encryption systems and secure collaborative learning. It requires a solid introduction to cryptography and systems. Topics include blockchain, smart contracts, and zero-knowledge proofs, among others.
This course is a graduate seminar on developing (secure) systems from decentralized trust.
In the past years, there has been much excitement in both academia and industry around the notion of decentralized security, which refers to, loosely speaking, security mechanisms that do not rely on the trustworthiness of any central entity. In only a few years, this area has generated many beautiful cryptographic constructs as well as a tremendous amount of real-world adoption, through blockchain, secure custody of secrets, secure collaborative learning – and now forming the technical backbone of the movement on “web3.0”.
The course will cover topics such as decentralized ledger systems, decentralized authentication and access control, end-to-end encryption systems, secure collaborative learning through secure multi-party computation, and others. For concrete learning, throughout the class we will develop a decentralized trust stack enabling common decentralized trust applications (3 units).
This is an advanced course, requiring a solid introduction to cryptography (CS161 or equivalent) and to systems (CS162 or equivalent).
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There is no required textbook for this class. You can refer to the Berkeley CS161 textbook to refresh on security concepts and A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography for cryptography.