Security is becoming increasingly important to guarantee reliable data storage, communication, and electronic transactions. This is an introductory course to cybersecurity. The main goal is to provide the students with means to reason about cybersecurity and get familiar with cryptographic primitives and protocols. More precisely, it aims to provide the students: an overview of basic information and network security concepts and methods as well as a good knowledge of some commonly used network and cryptographic tools and protocols. The students will get a sound understanding of theory and implementation. We will describe attacks against existing schemes and how they can be avoided. The students will gain an appreciation of the difficulties involved in employing security protocols and tools to build secure systems.

In this course, we will discuss cryptographic primitives and protocols that are employed to guarantee secure and privacy‑preserving outsourcing of computations to one or multiple untrusted servers. We will consider settings where one or multiple clients (users) outsource the computations, the generality of the functions being outsourced, the efficiency of the computations and the ability of the clients to verify the returned computed results. Connections of outsourcing computations with federated learning will also be discussed. We will use papers in this research area published in top venues in security and privacy e.g., ACM CCS, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Eurocrypt, AsiaCrypt