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5

This must be an incredibly difficult course to try to teach in six/seven weeks. There's a ton of material to cover and I appreciate that the course touches on all of the basics of crypto that are actually in use.

My only complaint is that some of the questions on the quizzes were really repetitive week-to-week. In particular, every week features a question (usually #3, if I remember correctly) that had you choose which constructions out of five choices were "secure" as per the definition of security for that week's topic. The problem was that the correct and incorrect answers were always similar, even though the security concept for each week was different! In other words, there are some things that will NEVER be secure for any crypto system. Every version of the question had several choices that fell into this category. It got to the point that I usually got the question correct on the first or second attempt without even trying that hard. In reality, that question should have required a lot more brain power from me because those security challenges are actually sometimes very subtle and difficult.

But that's truly my only criticism. I loved the course and the programming assignments. I'll be keeping an eye out for any more courses taught by Dr. Boneh.

The theoretical part of the course, though dense and fast paced, was very informative. Being recorded it had the advantage for the student of being pausable and repeatable. The great disappointment was the programming part of the course, which I was very much looking forward to, in which the problems were great and have great potential to help the student learn something, but help was minimal (rather tautological, unrevealing, or plain condescending). Fortunately, the programming assignments were option and did not count towards the final grade. But I repeat, they do seem immensely valuable in their topic and difficulty as a learning experience, but guidance in a programming part of the course would be welcome for a change.

Overall, a great course! There's always room for improvement. Certain complex and critical concepts were glossed over way too fast in the lectures (with speech compression in the recordings to boot), while other introductory material was gone over too slowly. There is an answer string evaluation problem in the Q's & A's where the required answer must contain a bullet dot to represent multiplication (an 'x' is not accepted) but the standard computer keyboard does not contain a bullet symbol, you have to be in a word processor to create that. Also, there are correct alternative answers for Q#'s 6,9, &12 in the Week 5 Quiz that need to be re-evaluated.

4 stars not because the course is somehow bad, no! It's really good but... It's not for complete beginners: you'll need bits, bytes, some maths and computer science knowledge. Second: it's more theoretical than practical and you really have to learn definitions of some terms. Third: questions during the videos sometimes want an answer in TeX notation, but I never seen information about it! And programming tasks: you can't just copy and paste data you're working with. This is a problem. Despite that - a good course. Learned a lot of new things, crypto algorithms and schemes are well explained. Now thinking about Crypto II...

Good course, covers pretty interesting material. The level is quite high and technical though, so I wouldn't call it introductory - you definitely need a basis in CS/algebra and a basic understanding of computer security in general.

Quizzes and videos are good but the course could use a better emphasis on coding (the programming assignments provided very little guidance and there's essentially no code in the lectures - probably by design but that can leave you hanging if you're looking for a practical rather than purely theoretical understanding of the topic).

This class is hardly a beginners class and requires quite a bit more time than indicated. Especially if it has been 25 years since collage... Other reviews asked about an beginners course in Cryptography. I took Coursera's "Introduction to Applied Cryptography from University of London" before this one, which was helpful regarding concepts, nomenclature etc. That said I really enjoyed the problem solving required to pass the Quizzes. I appreciate that all of the material was easily downloaded from the very beginning and I learned a lot. Thank you.

Fast dialog made it so I had to watch the videos multiple times, copy of the discussion in text form helped.

The in the lesson questions, didn't know how to format the responses to make them work. Also when the session when to the question reply mode, it showed the question but covered up the graphic part of the question so you lost that context. Possible because I was full screen mode.

Well done all in all.

This course is great for people who already have a grip on discrete math. For others it may seem fast paced and unintuitive. But if you put in the work to understand the mathematical concepts from the ground up, this course can get easier. The instructor could have emphasized more on the intuition behind the concepts rather than symbolic representation. Overall a good course on introductory cryptography

A very good course. The pace is quite high and the material is challenging. I think to get the best out of it you need to spend considerably more time than the course suggests each week and I was not able to do this. However, I have come out of the course with a good understanding of the basic concepts of cryptography and my interest in the subject has been piqued sufficiently to want to find out more!

The teacher is really an expert on the topic and I learned a lot from the course. The only criticism I'd offer is that some of the lectures make it hard to see the forest from the trees early on -- e.g., a lot of information might be provided early on in a lecture and the point is not really clear till the end. That said, I'm glad to have taken it and am considering taking the next part.

I really enjoyed this course! Symetric security was quite easy for me. But when it came to public key security I felt so lost because of all that deep math. Maybe it may have better and more detailed explanation, but maybe it just my problem with math (which I'm aware and aknowledge even without this course :D).But definitely worth time spent. Waiting for Cryptography II now.

Thanks.

It would be really amazing if Dan tries to go lot more abstract in each video; and not explain the same concepts over and over again. I feel that it becomes particularly boring to keep hearing the recaps over and over again. In general, the course was a tough one for me! But the instructor, with his immense knowledge and great way of explaining things did create an impact!

I found the course far too difficult to be honest, it requires a lot of reading time to finish the quizes, and I had trouble completing it. That of course can also be perceived as agood thing for students who want to specialize on the subject.

I wanted this course to learn some basics of encryption for my research, but I felt a bit swamped.

"Completing this cryptography course has been an incredibly rewarding experience. It provided a solid foundation and deep insights into both theory and application, making complex concepts accessible and engaging. I feel well-equipped and inspired to apply these skills in real-world scenarios. Highly recommended!"

Excellent course. One of the most difficult ones I followed on Coursera. It's a bit dry due to the amount of math in such a short time and because it lacks a bit on the practical side of things. The optional coding assignments are good but I would have preferred a more practical approach for the course as a whole.

This course really a best course for cryptography basics and intermediate level. Only negative thing is that real-time approach of how to use crypto-libraries not explained here. So if anyone want to implement the cryptography standards to their product/design, need to refer other sites.

I liked the level commitment the programming problems demanded. It truly made you feel you had a deeper understanding of the subject after finishing them as opposed to just reading and answering multiple choice questions. Thanks for putting this together for the world to learn!

Some of the questions in the quizzes were vague and hard to comprehend. Also the professor's hand writing on the notes doesn't help since it's messy and the marker quality is not that good either.

Apart from the above, a good intro course to crypto, thanks.