I took an online cryptography course from this professor a few years back. It was very good.
Even though I have a background in math that class made me realize I don't want to be a professional cryptographer, which in itself is pretty nice.
But all joking aside I really enjoyed the way that crypto systems were analyzed using demons and games to try and discern the random bit stream from the encrypted bytes.
Same here. I also took the course from Coursera a few years ago and I really enjoyed it. The conclusion? It’s hard to get it right so don’t do crypto yourself! Quite cynical, but it kinda killed my interest in pursuing it further.
Yes that is a lesson I took from it, I'm not sure if it was this class or another one that showed how crypto on a computer could be defeated by monitoring its power consumption while checking a password. Even though the code knew to wait a set amount of time whether or not the password was correct, it wasn't drawing any power after the first incorrect digit allowing attackers to workout the correct digits one at a time.
Even though I have a background in math that class made me realize I don't want to be a professional cryptographer, which in itself is pretty nice. But all joking aside I really enjoyed the way that crypto systems were analyzed using demons and games to try and discern the random bit stream from the encrypted bytes.