CSIA 410 – Cryptology

Welcome to CSIA 410 Cryptology. In this class you will learn about cryptology which is the study or science of hiding and revealing hidden or secret messages. After completing this course you should have an operational understanding of basic cryptographic systems. Specifically you will learn about substitution and transposition ciphers, poly-alphabet ciphers, one-time pads. the Vernam Cipher, the XOR function, cryptographically secure pseudo random number generators, symmetric stream ciphers, symmetric block ciphers, cryptographic hash functions, asymmetric encryption, Transport Layer Security (TLS), Certificate Authorities, X.509 Certificates, and the Public Key Infrastructure.

This course description, like most course descriptions, is slightly problematic. That is, it isn’t very helpful because it contains a list of terms like asymmetric encryption or public key infrastructure that will only make sense if you already know what they mean; otherwise the terms may sound like a bunch of gibberish. And if you already know what the terms mean then there’s a good chance that you already know quite a bit about cryptology so there may not be much point in taking the class. But don’t worry, if you don’t know what the terms mean you’ll learn about all of them in the class and by the end of the course description will make sense.