News will be posted in PANDA. Introduction to Cryptography (ItC) will be an online course this term. As rough overview, this means that we upload lecture contents and assignments once a week. Afterwards, you have a week to familiarize yourselves with the contents and hand in the assignments in digital form. Especially, there is no "live" tutorial, having the advantage that you can choose your own slots for working on ItC.

There are two types of homework which we provide via PANDA and Jupyter (where you can login with your IMT credentials). Beyond obtaining bonus points, these excercises help you to apply your new knowledge from the lecture. Or to realise where you need to have another look into the contents. Especially, it will help you to deal with exercises in the exam.

Making a long story short: We strongly encourage you to thoroughly work on the homework.

Type-1 Homework

Type-1 homework deals with the content of one specific week and is designed for repetition and comprehension. It can be solved within a short timeframe, assuming you've already put some work towards understanding the content.

Type-2 Homework

Type-2 homework is designed to deepen your understanding by asking advanced questions (potentially spanning multiple topics). These are more time-intensive and may require you to come up with the right ideas. Solving these excersises grants a bonus for your final grade. Type-2 exercises can be solved in groups. Indeed, teaming up and (virtually) meeting in order to solve the given problems, often results in a better understanding and, well, more fun.

Besides homework, we will provide tutorial exercises. Together with these we will upload further material which gives you a way to validate your solutions. You should work on these exercises before looking into this material. Such exercises are not part of the bonus system and are planned to simulate parts of the tutorials. Most notably, we intend to elaborate on central, more complex parts of the lecture contents. Further, these exercises may help you to deal with type-2 homework.

You have to pass the type-1 assignments in 10 weeks in order to unlock bonus steps. A weekly type-1 exercise is considered "passed" if you reach at least 50% of its points.

Given this requirement, if you achieved at least

• 50% of all points in type-2 exercises and you pass the exam, then your grade will improve by one grade step (e.g., 2.3 to 2.0)
• 75% of all points in type-2 exercises and you pass the exam, then your grade will instead improve by two grade steps (e.g., 2.3 to 1.7)

The exam will be written. Yet, it is to be determined how exactly this will look, e.g. whether this happens digitally or in an appropriate way in the university. You need to register for the exam via PAUL. In PAUL you can also find further details regarding the registration phases. We 

We will offer two slots at the end of the semester. Further details will be announced (e.g. via PAUL, Panda). The preliminary dates are:

• 26.02.2021
• 26.03.2021