Uses and Misuses of Cryptography: How to Use Crypto Properly and Attack Those That Don't

Overview

Most security professionals and software engineers working in security are familiar with the basic concepts of cryptography. However, many do not really understand what security guarantees are provided by different cryptographic primitives, which constructions are recommended and which should not be used (and why), and how easy it is to misuse cryptography to the point that it is trivially broken. In this course, we will take a broad look at cryptographic concepts, constructions and implementation dangers and issues. A wide variety of primitives and topics will be studied. For just a few examples: we will understand the fundamental differences between stream and block and ciphers and their uses in encryption, message authentication and protocols; we will study the security of cryptographic hash functions and learn advanced attacks like low-memory birthday attacks and rainbow tables; and we will study RSA with a focus on how it works and how it is attacked. The aim of the course is to understand the security guarantees provided by a variety of cryptographic primitives, obtain an idea as to how they are constructed and how they work, learn how they can be properly and improperly used, and be familiar with the main attacks against them and their ramifications. The course will be filled with real-world examples of crypto misuses and we will demonstrate how difficult it is to do crypto properly and how devastating the results are when it is misused.

This course is of importance to anyone who uses cryptography in any way in their products, and to developers who either use existing cryptographic libraries or implement their own.

In addition to frontal lectures (which will themselves be highly interactive), participants will solve theoretical and applied exercises in dedicated exercise sessions in order to help them understand and internalize the material.

Note: this is a three day course.

What to bring

Students should bring paper, pens and laptops.

Trainer

Andrew (Yehuda) Lindell is an Associate Professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Andrew attained a Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2002 and spent two years at the IBM T.J. Watson research lab as a Postdoctoral fellow in the cryptography research group. Andrew has carried out extensive research in cryptography, and has published more than 60 conference and journal publications, as well as an undergraduate textbook on cryptography and a book detailing secure protocols. Andrew has presented at numerous international conferences, workshops and university seminars, and has served on program committees for top international conferences in cryptography. In addition to Andrew's notable academic work, he has significant industry experience and has worked on the cryptographic and security issues that arise in the design and construction of authentication schemes, smartcard applications, software protection schemes and more.