SC700

Internet Information Protocols

Professor Ari Trachtenberg

Time: Spring 2000. Tuesdays and Thursdays 2-4pm.

Description: Information is the currency of the internet, and information protocols manage this currency. An effective power broker of this information must assure its clients speed, accuracy, security, and availability. Both academia and industry have been grappling with these issues in a futile attempt to keep up with explosive internet growth.

This course will explore interdependencies among four general areas of information transfer mentioned above: speed through data compression, accuracy through error-correction, security through cryptography, and availability through distributed computing. We will examine information protocols currently in use on the internet, drawing from recent academic literature. Students will be expected to present a relevant publication as part of the course.

Tentative Topics:

• data compression: Huffman encoding, Lempel-Ziv compression (e.g. gzip)

• error-correction: Hamming codes, Reed-Solomon codes

• cryptography: cipher encryption techniques and attacks, RSA encryption (e.g. Netscape) and attacks, cryptography based on error-correcting codes, elliptic-curve cryptosystems

• distributed computing: resource discovery, data reconciliation based on error-correcting codes, reconciliation through interpolation, information dispersal

Prerequisites:

• SC504 or SC546 or SC561 or equivalent (see instructor)

• Some background in finite fields