Additional Courses

Beyond the basics, we offer advanced courses to dig deeper into the subject. We group them into three different tracks, which emphasize slightly different aspects. You may of course choose any selection of the lectures, according to your preference. We believe, though, that the track on Crypto and Coding will best address the preferences of students who enjoy more formal approaches, and that the tracks on Privacy and Network security better address the preferences of students who enjoy more applied research.

Track: Crypto and Coding (more formal/mathematical)

• Cryptography and Cryptanalysis takes the cryptographic algorithms deeper, and also discusses how to break them. A brief intro takes you through historical ciphers and mathematical approaches that have been developed to break them. The goal of course is to analyse current cryptographic algorihtms, like DES and AES and discuss different mathematical approaches to breaking them. We offer Crypto every summer term.
• Coding theory (Kanalkodierung) takes you further into the theory of source- and especially channel codes. We explain how codes help mitigate smaller and bigger errors when storing and transmitting data, both from a theoretical point of view, but also showing you how codes are applied in day-to-day technologies like DVDs and Blueray discs as well as DVB and DAB. Coding theory is held every winter term, in German.

Track: Privacy (more applied/practical)

• Security and Cryptography 2 is our "PETs" (Privacy Enhancing Technologies) lecture. It gives you an overview of the principles that can help achieve privacy and anonymity, and demonstrates them by looking at different PETs that you can apply in reality to protect yourself (like for instance TOR and AN.ON). We offer SaC 2 every summer term.
• Facebook Mining is a very hands on lecture to show you how much information can be inferred about you just by knowing who you're "connected" to, or which pages you have "liked". We give you a brief introduction to Machine Learning techniques, show you how to mine data from the Web, and how you can learn and predict frequent attribute combinations, terminally estimating information about users which they don't share on their profiles. The lecture is very applied, so we subsequently brainstorm different inference attacks, which then are implemented and tested in small groups throughout the term. We offer Facebook Mining every winter term.

Track: Network security (more applied/practical)

• Resilient Networking focuses on the Internet: we take a quick tour of the common security protocols IPsec and TLS. We then take a turn and look at different ways to actually attack the network itself: from attacks (and defenses!) on DNS and routing, over DDoS, censorship (-circumvention) all the way to firewalls and intrusion detection systems. This course is divided into a lecture and a reading group, in which we have a look at the newest attacks and defences from the top researchers and network security experts together.