Overview of courses
Here is an overview of the planned course offerings.
Undergraduate level – Bachelor Informatik, University of Bern
Two yearly courses:
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Diskrete Mathematik (Fall)
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Algorithmen, Wahrscheinlichkeit und Information (in German) (Spring)
Graduate level – University of Bern and Joint Master in Computer Science
Four courses planned with rotating schedule:
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Distributed Algorithms (Fall 2024)
This course provides an introduction to computing in a distributed environment without a central coordinator. It presents fundamental programming abstractions for distributed systems and fault-tolerant, highly available, and secure protocols that implement them. Important problems of distributed computing are discussed and influential impossibility results are shown. The central question of the course is how to tolerate uncertainty and adversarial influence, which may arise from network delays, faults, or malicious attacks in a distributed system. Topics include replication, quorums, reliable broadcast, distributed storage, consensus, Byzantine agreement, atomic broadcast, and notions of consistency arising in this setting. Applications to real-world systems will be presented, in the domain of cloud computing, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain systems.
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Cryptography (Spring 2025)
Cryptography addresses the protection of data in the digital world; it has become a crucial technology for the information society, with influence to public policy and questions of privacy. This course presents an introduction to modern cryptography. Based on mathematical models for reasoning about the security of information systems, the course explains the fundamental concepts of cryptography and discusses the most important cryptographic algorithms that are in everyday use on the Internet. It covers security proofs, computational security, pseudorandomness, block ciphers, hash functions, and message authentication. Public-key cryptosystems and public-key signature schemes that rely on number-theoretic primitives are also introduced and some elementary cryptographic protocols will be presented.
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Cryptographic protocols (Fall 2025)
This course gives an introduction to the amazing world of cryptographic protocols with multilateral security. They realize such diverse goals as zero-knowledge proofs, secure multi-party computation, private online elections, auctions without trusted parties, distributed threshold cryptosystems and more. These methods have been developed over the last decades and start to find applications on the Internet today, ranging from nation-wide electronic voting and secure cloud platforms to cryptocurrencies and blockchains.
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Privacy and Data Security (Spring 2026)
This course focuses on privacy and security in a digital world. It presents cryptographic and non-cryptographic methods relevant for protecting privacy, anonymity, and data security. Topics include pseudonymity, data anonymization and de-anonymization, notions of privacy and privacy regulation, measures for the privacy of data, steganography and traffic hiding, network anonymity, and censorship resistance. Systems like onion routing (TOR) and Freenet are presented. Knowledge in computer science and networking is needed, but no background in cryptography is expected.
In addition we offer every semester a seminar with a topic that changes from one iteration to the next.
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Seminar: Cryptography and Data Security
The seminar in cryptology and data security covers various relevant topics in the area and its contents will change from one semester to another. Typical subjects are cryptographic protocols, secure computation, privacy, distributed trust and blockchains. A seminar will start with an overview of the topic, where some basic principles are introduced. The main content will typically consist of interactive presentations by the participants, on the basis of the existing literature, ranging from classic research papers to recently developed systems. In addition, students as well as members of the cryptology and data security research group will present their own current work.