COMS E6184 — Anonymity and Privacy (Spring '17)

"Anonymity and Privacy" will be taught as a seminar class. Students will be expected to read and present a wide variety of papers; these will include technical papers, statutes, court opinions, and the like. Prerequisites include reasonable familiarity with networking and cryptography. Grading will be based on class presentations of these papers — the exact number will depend on the total enrollment — class discussion, and on two papers, one in lieu of the midterm and one in lieu of the final. There will be no exams.

Topics will include:

• Legal framework (US and European)
• Data mining and databases
• Anonymous commerce (digital cash)
• Anonymous use of the Internet (onion routing, anonymous browsing, P3P)
• Traffic analysis
• Biometrics and authentication
• Policy and national security considerations

The reading list is subject to change in response to current events.

Background Reading on Cryptographic Protocols

• Chapters 2-4 of Applied Cryptography, Bruce Schneier, Wiley 1996, available in the SEAS library.
• "Using encryption for authentication in large networks of computers", R. Needham and M. Schroeder, Communications of the ACM 21:12 (Dec 1978). This is the first cryptographic protocol published in the open literature (available via the CU library network).
• "Timestamps in key distribution protocols", D. Denning and G. Sacco, Communications of the ACM 24:8 (Aug 1981). A bug and a fix in the Needham-Schroeder protocol. Note: the fix is buggy, too; see if you can find the problem. There's also another bug in Needham-Schroeder that wasn't found until 1995. (available via the CU library network).