Prerequisites:

Recommended (will be helpful, but is not mandatory):  Discrete Math.

John provides his information to netflix. He thinks its private. Netflix exposes his preferences, but removes all references to John himself from the data. Why should John be worried?

Alice wants an answer from Bob. But she does not want Bob to know the question!

Charlie puts up pictures on the web. Bob downloads one of them from Flickr. How can he be sure the picture was Charlie's and not a counterfeit from Mallory?

A secret must be distributed among N people so that a minimum of T of them must pool their knowledge in order to learn anything about the recipe?

Answers to questions such as the above (many lie in a variety of computational fields such as Cryptography, Secure Multi-Party Computation, Watermarking, Secret Sharing,

In this course we will cover a variety of topics related to privacy and security, including basic cryptography, secret sharing, privacy-preserving computation, data-hiding and steganography, and the latest algorithms for data mining with privacy.

This will be a participatory course. Students will be required to present 1-3 papers during the semester. Papers must be analysed and presented in detail. Discussion and questions will be encouraged.

Grading will be based on participation and presentation.

PDFs and/or links to a suggested set of papers to be read may be found on the course twiki