Cryptography I
Link:
https://www.coursera.org/course/crypto
Institution:
Stanford University
Instructor:
Dan Boneh
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Some Personal Experience:
I have taken this course twice. The last time was in 2012, when I was still working toward my Bachelor's degree. I was busy with the schoolwork and had little time working on the course, but I still tried to at least learn the concepts. I did not complete any programming assignment except one and did not take the final. The result is:
.
The above is the certificate for the session back that time. Although the result met my personal goal at that time, it can clearly be seen that improvement can be made.
As a result, I took the course again. The result looks more brilliant than that in 2012. This time, I completed all programming assignments and took the final. The percentage I got for the course is now 91.7 %, with distinction (the new certificate can be found at https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B53jbj-6Ew8QNEtMbDJUbUdfSlk&usp=sharing).
Lectures:
The lectures for the two sessions I have taken are similar. The materials covered are similar. Ciphers (including some stream ciphers and block ciphers) and attacks were introduced. How to and how not to use the ciphers, as well as why, were covered. Some message integrity mechanisms were introduced, which were combined with block ciphers for authenticated encryption. Attacks on message integrity and incorrect use of authenticated encryption mechanisms were covered.
The flow for the ciphers and attacks was quite similar through the course, so it was easy to get used to the lecture flow. Something more out of the flow was the introduction to the number theory that would be used for public key encryption, which certainly could not follow the mechanism-attack flow (because the number theory is not a cipher at all).
The most difficult part, in my opinion, was the math involved, especially the number theory, but math is almost always cute in my opinion, so I did not have any issue with it throughout the course.
As for the professor, his pronunciation was clear, so with the captions, there was no issue for me to get what he said.
There were lecture slides to view online or download, which is convenient for visual learners.
Problem Sets and Final:
The problems sets included both multiple choice and non-multiple-choice problems. Usually, math was used to examine security of certain usages of ciphers. The problems usually required thinking (instead of simply memorizing and pick). However, since they were based on the lectures, it was not difficult to answer them if one understands well the materials covered.
The types of problems in the final was similar to those in the problem sets.
Programming Assignments:
They extended from the lectures. Most were about attacking (virtually) on something that was known broken in terms of security. One could choose the language he/she liked for the assignments. For the number theory programming assignment, some special algorithms were the tasks. The programming assignments, like the problem sets, were not difficult if one understands the materials covered. The instruction sometimes contained useful information. The most tricky part, in my opinion, was familiarizing oneself with the libraries of the language used. (DO NOT implement your own cipher.) However, using the Internet to find the documentation and other informational articles or discussions, one should be able to use those libraries in terms of completing the assignments.
For the number theory programming assignment, I used Java to make use of BigInteger class and encountered one issue, which I solved (I wrote about this in another article: http://csdspnest.blogspot.com/2014/03/bigintegersqrt.html).
Discussion Forums:
As in other MOOCs, discussion forums are often helpful. There were other students sharing useful information such as proving certain probability in the lectures that the professor did not prove in the lectures.
Summary:
The course was not very different from other MOOCs in terms of teaching methods. The video quality and quality of materials were fine.
(I do not recommend this course to anyone who does not have any programming knowledge unless the person does not plan to complete the programming assignments.)
