Cryptography Nico Döttling, Antoine Joux and Benoit Cogliati

We have uploaded the exam grades to the LSF. Students who could not attend the inspection of the main exam and who asked ahead of time to inspect their exam at the re-exam inspection will be allowed to do so. Furthermore, we have uploaded the solutions to the main exam. You will find it in the materials section under additional material.

Dear students,

We had quite a number of non-showups for the main exam. If you have registered for the exam in LSF, but did not show up and would like us to de-register you in the LSF, please send us a short email shortly stating your (sensible) reasons for not showing up (unless you have done so already). No medical certificates required.

Dear Students,

We have made a scheduling for the exam inspection tomorrow (05.08.2020). The inspection will take place at the lecture hall of the CISPA building (E 9 1). We have scheduled according to the first letter of your last names

• Last names starting with A-J: 13:00 
• Last names starting with K-Z: 13:30

So far 25 people have signed up for the exam inspection on Wednesday. If you want to inspect your exam, on Wednesday, sign up until 23:59 today. This is a firm deadline! The next opportunity will only be for the inspection of the re-exam, which will tentatively be in October (the inspection that is, the exam is on 22.09.2020)

Dear Students,

The main exam inspection will text place Wednesday, 05.08.2020.

If you attended the main exam and would like to inspect it, you need to register until Monday 03.08.2020 23:59 in the CMS under Registrations --> Main Exam Inspection. If you register, we will assign you a time slot for inspection and you need to show up at the given time slot. The university's corona rules are strict: If you do not sign up until the above deadline, you will not be admitted to the exam inspection and you have to wait for the re-exam inspection.

We've published the exam results. We tried to display the points of the individual questions to you, but this lead to some unexpected and weird information to be displayed, which is why we have disabled this for now.

If you haven't done so, you can check out your overall points and grade in the CMS.

Dear Students,

If you did not register for the exam in the CMS or asked us directly for a late registration until now, please don't appear to the exam tomorrow as we do not have additional space and the university's distancing rules prohibit seating additional students in the available space.

If at this point, you have signed up for the exam in the LSF but have not been seated, please write us a mail and we will take care that your LSF-registration for this exam will be cancelled.

Dear Students,

we have made the seating arrangements for the main exam. To see which lecture hall you were assigned to go to
Materials --> Exam Seating --> Main Exam Room Assignment
to find out which lecture hall you were assigned to.

To find out in which spot you will sit check out the seating plan for the lecture hall you were assigned to.

We will later send a separate news item discussing the corona-specific modalities of the exam.

As for the exam modalities:

• You are allowed to bring a simple non-programmable standard calculator
• You are allowed to bring a cheat sheet consisting of 1 A4 sheet (front + back), we will only allow hand-written sheets.
• Any (real) cheating attempt, in particular the use of a smartphone, will lead to immediate failure in the exam.
• The exam will start at 9:30, make sure to be there at least 20 min earlier, we will not permit entry after 9:30

The tentative date for the inspection of the main exam is 5.08.20, the place is the CISPA (E 9.1) lecture hall (room 0.05). Due to Corona regulations, there will be very stringent rules about the number of people who are allowed to be together in the room. We will therefore set up a registration for the inspection and assign you a specific time slot for the inspection. 

We've opened the exam registration for the main exam on the CMS. You need to register here so that we can make the seating arrangements. This is especially critical this year, so please sign up as soon as possible.
Moreover, don't forget to register for the exam in the LSF, this is a separate process.
tl;dr: Register for the main exam both here in the CMS and in the LSF!

We have uploaded the main and the re-exam of 2019 together with their respective solutions. We have crossed out content which was not covered this year. Also bear in mind that we used slightly different notation last year and that the focus of the lecture has slightly changed since. You will find them in the additional materials section.

The second midterm will start in 1.5h and is designed for a workload of 30min. We will again be available on the discord server in case some issues should arise.

The midterm exam will be made available as Midterm 2 under "Midterms" in the materials section at 13:00. You will have 1h to upload you solution under "Submissions", "Midterm Exam 2" in CMS.

We have now uploaded all lectures which will be relevant for the exams, that is the exams will cover material starting from 01_01 Historical Ciphers until and including 09_03 The Fiat Shamir transform. We will still upload additional material, but this will be bonus material and not be mandatory for the exam. We will indicate that this material is not relevant for the exams.

The second midterm exam will be on Monday 06.07.20 from 13:00 - 14:00 Central European Summer Time.

The topics in this midterm will cover material from Chapter 5.01 (Hash Function Definitions) until Chapter 8.03 (Hybrid Encryption).

We encourage everyone to participate in the midterm, even if you have already qualified for the exam!

The same terms and conditions as for the first midterm apply, we repeat them here for your convenience.

• We will upload the midterm in the materials section and make it available on 06.07.20 at 13:00.
• The midterm is designed to take 30min. We give you 30min extra time to account for any technical problems you may encounter.
• It will be an editable pdf. Fill in your answers directly into the pdf file and don't forget to save it.
• During a Q&A session we found out that it is not possible to edit the pdf in web-based pdf viewers such as the pdf viewer of chrome.
• Thus, please download the pdf and edit it locally, preferably using the adobe acrobat reader.
• To make sure that you can edit the pdf and save modification, we have uploaded a file called "PDF Form Check" under Additional Material in the Materials section. Please download this file and make sure you can edit and save it. If it does not work with your default pdf viewer please first try installing Adobe Acrobat Reader.
• Once you are done with the midterm, log into the CMS. Under the heading "Submissions" you will find an item "Midterm Exam 2". Upload your solution here. This works in the very same way as uploading your exercise sheet solutions.
• If you you should have trouble down- or uploading the exam, please contact us immediately, e.g. via mail (if this is possible).
• We will also be online on the office-hour discord server to assist you in case of technical problems.
• If you have any further questions, please use the Askbot to ask them, so that everyone else can see both the question and answers.

Dear students,

as a service we've compiled screenshots for the algebra lectures which were screencaptured and therefore have no official slides.
Watching the lectures is still necessary for understanding the material as many comments are not reflected in writing, but this might help you to look up details/take notes during the homework or in the exam-preparation.

You can check whether you passed the midterm by logging in to CMS. You should have also gotten a mail with your passing status. 4 points were sufficient to pass. Recall that passing the midterm only qualifies you for the main exam, there is no score bonus for the final grade. If you did not pass this midterm, you have a second chance to qualify in the second midterm, which will be in July.

Edit: You can find the solutions of the midterm in the materials section

As announced, the midterm exam will take place on Monday 08.06.20 from 13:00 - 14:00 Central European Summer Time. Please read the following carefully:

• We will upload the midterm in the materials section and make it available on 08.06.20 at 13:00.
• The midterm is designed to take 30min. We give you 30min extra time to account for any technical problems you may encounter.
• It will be an editable pdf. Fill in your answers directly into the pdf file and don't forget to save it.
• During the last Q&A session we found out that it is not possible to edit the pdf in web-based pdf viewers such as the pdf viewer of chrome.
• Thus, please download the pdf and edit it locally, preferably using the adobe acrobat reader.
• To make sure that you can edit the pdf and save modification, we have uploaded a file called "PDF Form Check" under Additional Material in the Materials section. Please download this file and make sure you can edit and save it. If it does not work with your default pdf viewer please first try installing Adobe Acrobat Reader.
• Once you are done with the midterm, log into the CMS. Under the heading "Submissions" you will find an item "Midterm Exam". Upload your solution here. This works in the very same way as uploading your exercise sheet solutions.
• If you you should have trouble down- or uploading the exam, please contact us immediately, e.g. via mail (if this is possible).
• We will also be online on the office-hour discord server to assist you in case of technical problems.
• If you have any further questions, please use the Askbot to ask them, so that everyone else can see both the question and answers.

We have uploaded the lectures on basic algebra. The suggested viewing date for Basic Algebra 1 is 15.06 10:00, for Basic Algebra 2 18.06 10:00 and for Basic Algebra 3 and 4 22.06 10:00. These lectures were recorded via screen capture, consequently we currently don't have pdf slides for them.

Thanks for your patience regarding the midterm. We have looked into platform options to conduct the midterm exam and were not satisfied. We have now decided to conduct the midterm exam in the following way:

• Next Monday, instead of the Q&A session we will make the midterm exam available in the materials section at 13:00
• The midterm will be designed to have a workload of 30min
• The midterm exam will come as an editable pdf form, that is you can directly type your answers into the pdf and save them. 
• Once you are finished, you will upload the exam (still a pdf) as a submission in the cms
• To account for any technical difficulties that might arise, you will be given a buffer of 30min. Consequently, you will have until 14:00 to upload the exam.
• We will conduct a dry-run tomorrow during the Q&A session to make sure the pdf file is editable on everyone's machine

We received some more questions, our response is in the Q&A (for your convenience here as well)

Q: Which topics of the lecture are how relevant for the exam?

A: As a general rule, the exercise sheets provide a good orientation for what to expect from the exam. Naturally, we will not query in-depth knowledge of topics that were only skimmed over in the lecture. You should however, be familiar with the high-level concepts discussed in all lectures. In case of doubt regarding a specific topic, please come to the Q&A session, ask your question there and we will clarify.

Dear students,

The topics covered in the first midterm will range from the first lecture up until hash functions. That means the lectures including 5_03 will be covered. The duration of the exam will be 30 minutes and the tasks can be expected to be similar to what is required in the homework, however it will be adjusted to the shorter timeframe in extend and complexity. Multiple choice and knowledge from the lectures may be required, too.

As previously stated, you need to reach at least 30% in one of the two midterms to participate in the exam at the end of the semester.

The date of 8.6. 13:00 is still tentative, because we are facing technical difficulties with the setup for the online exam server. Be prepared to have the exam at this date, we are working hard on getting everything up and running by then. Should all fail, the exam will have to be postponed again, though. We are sorry for your inconvenience and hope that this helps to clarify some details.
 

This week's office hour on Thursday won't take place due to a public holiday.

However, to make up for it, we arranged to hold the session on Wednesday from 1pm to 5pm instead. So you can go ahead and get your questions answered!

The Discord channel can be found in the materials section, as always.

We would like to compile a list of students who are not or cannot be physically present in Saarbrücken. If this is the case for you, please write a short mail to doettling@cispa.saarland, stating your course of study and by what date you expect to be physically present in Saarbrücken. Thanks for your help!

We have received questions via the feedback option and during the office hour session, and since this is of importance to all of you we would like to provide answers and clarifications here. In a nutshell, you should consider everything that happens before 04.05.2020 as a test-run, as we do not have any prior experience in online teaching. 

We rephrased the most common questions. 

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Q: Do I have to watch the video lectures as they come out? Even before the official start of the semester on 04.05.2020? Will I have a disadvantage from not watching the videos before the official start of the semester?

A: No. Everything that happens until 04.05.2020 is absolutely voluntary and you will be at no disadvantage if you ignore this lecture until then. Everything that happens until then should be considered a service from us to you (and a test-run for us at the same time). We will set up a calendar with suggested viewing dates for the videos, I.e. when and which lectures you should watch starting from the 04.05. We hoped that our first news board post made it clear that everything which happens before the 04.05 is non-mandatory, but we stress it here once more.

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Q: At which pace will lectures and exercise sheets be uploaded? In the course Nebenläufige Programmierung all recorded lectures from last year were already made available online.

A: We do not have pre-recorded lectures from last year, and right now we are essentially putting the Chapters online once we are finished recording and editing them. The intention is that anyone who wants to watch them can watch them, in the same way as you can watch any other online lectures. But this comes at no obligation for you to watch them as they come out. Regarding the exercise sheets, note that working on exercise sheets is entirely voluntary and the “scheduled” hand-in date (if you want feedback on your solutions) for the first sheet is the 08.05.

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Q: What is my workload going to be for this lecture?

A: In a normal semester there would be 2 lectures per week, i.e. 3h of lecture per week. This year the summer semester will be 11 weeks (04.05-17.07). However, due to the different format of the lecture this year we will try to keep the amount of video lectures for you to watch at or below 2h per week and count on you participating the weekly 1h Q&A session, which takes place on Mondays at 1pm. Apart from that, we offer exercise sheets and the weekly office hour (Thursdays from 1pm to 5pm) which replaces the tutorials. As we are still receiving feedback, the times might be subject to change, but any changes will be announced.

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Q: Can you announce on the news board when new lectures go online?

A: We made an announcement when the first set of recorded lectures went online, but abstained from announcing the following lectures as we didn’t want to convey the impression that it is mandatory to watch them. Unless people start complaining about too much spam we will announce new recordings from now on.

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Q: How much material will the midterm exams cover?

A:  A preliminary (non-binding) date for the first mid-term is 04.06, the preliminary date for the second one is 02.07. So both mid-terms cover around 4 weeks of material, or 8-9h of video and 4 exercise sheets if you want so. But whether the mid-terms happen at all depends on the development of the Coronavirus situation.

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All this said, would also like to ask for your understanding that these are difficult times for us as well.

Today at 13:00 will be the first office hour. It will take place on our discord server https://discord.gg/GpanuQ . We encourage you to join and work on exercises together. The tutors will be present to answer your questions and give you small hints.

Sorry for the inconvenience of multiple platforms of communication, but we are still trying to figure out online teaching.

If you have questions, please refrain from using the feedback option and use the askbot instead, so we can answer directly. And to the person who asked: No, we haven't put the lectures online yet. We will announce it on this news board when the first lectures are online. Thanks for your patience!