I started loving Coursera since "Machine learning" by Andrew Ng and what amazed me most was his ability to explain complex mathematical concepts in really simple words, with clean, readable hand-drawn diagrams and drawings. I'm really missing this in the Cryptography course. This course is quite difficult to understand and follow. Even if you have background in probability, the lectures explain a little of the underlying concepts and most of the lecture is essentially reading formulas and definitions from the slides. Even the presentation is unreadable - the formulas on slides aren't actual mathematical formulas but formula-like text typed in PowerPoint without any mathematical symbols or typography (lower or upper indexes, fractions etc). For example, the Bayes law is presented in the course as rather cryptic string "Pr[A|B]=Pr[B|A]*Pr[A]/Pr[B]" and here's its original, clean and readable formula for comparison https://goo.gl/P8Cvu2 This gets even worse when it's being substituted into a multi-line equations, which - guess what - are simple PowerPoint text either.

Prof. Katz is an excellent teacher and has created excellent material for the course. He explains every lesson in the course in great detail and the quizzes are sufficiently challenging to validate what you've learnt from the lesson.

The assignments were Really hard, but really made the course worthwhile. I have a much better framework for thinking about cryptography in general, now.

I love the course material and the professor's way of teaching. This course is very detailed and one of the hardest course I ever took on Coursera.

An enjoyable trip through the history of crypto schemes, and practical attacks against them. By the end of this class you will have a good basic understanding of modern cryptography and real world implementations used online everyday. It's designed in a balanced way so that both those with a Mathematics background and those with programming backgrounds can both keep up.

One of the best course I have taken even though it was most challenging courses I have completed in Coursera. Thanks to Dr. Katz for his vast in depth knowledge and trying to simplify the best possible way. Worth time spending. Thank you.

Course is tense and loaded with information. It would be better if there are more information on PPTs. also if the numerical examples have more illustrations and more of themselves on any other additional material.

high quality, great content, well presented and worthy course. it helps me to understand concepts that

prior not clear to me.

I'm sure using knowledge from Cryptography help me understand when this strategy can be beneficial. May be modern Cryptography is a strategy as a science in all its forms. Now I use Cryptography every day, without even thinking that many popular applications use encryption. I thank the Coursera team, professor Jonathan Katz and University of Maryland for providing a good place to work, I am grateful for the good fortune to learn at the university, to communicate with the great minds, I'm not afraid of this word, experts in Cryptography.

I am now genuinely excited about cryptography. It is a huge field, but this is an excellent introduction. Having watching enough DefCon and Hak5, I know that a good number of 'professionals' in the industry are lacking the fundamentals. This course is the fundamentals. Dr. Katz is renown in the field, and obviously has a passion for the topic. I have also been re-inspired to 'make math my own.'

A very informative and easily understandable course! I always fancied math, but never really got deep into it, so some of the primitives discussed here were new to me, but even so I was able to easily understand them thanks to Prof. Katz! And of course it was super exciting to find out in which way are modern secure connections secure. 10/10 would pass again.

The course is a short but sufficient introduction to the fundamentals of cryptographic primitives and protocols. It requires only a very basic level of discrete mathematics (first-course on DM is sufficient). The programming assignments are also very insightful and Katz gives enjoyable lectures on best practices in using crypto primitives.

I am very fond of the way the course material was presented. I found the definitions and proofs to be rigorous and intuitive at the same time, which is of great importance when learning such material. The accompanying textbook is great, too. Although I was already familiar with parts of the material, I thoroughly enjoyed the course.

Cryptography is one of the areas that most developers know just enough of to be really dangerous. Reverse-engineering and debugging code I have seen way to many examples to list here of home-baked attempts at cryptography.

Enjoyed the course throughly, but I feel that I got a bit lost when studying the formal definitions of the various encryption schemes mentioned in the course. The programming assignments were helpful and challenging.

Such a brilliant course, I had a basic idea of cryptography but didn't know a lot. Taking this course put on the map a lot of things I knew already and definitely helped me learn so much more. Absolutely loved it.

Lots of notational math but a great course to get into the meat of cryptography and understand the foundation of this most important topic.

Underneath that Professor facade, I suspect he's a wild and crazy guy :-)

Wonderful Course!! Each and Every Terms and Process related to Cryptography was explained by the instructor in a clear and precise manner, this course really helped me in understanding Cryptography very well.

Very interesting course. I would like programming assignments to be mandatory, not optional. Or at least there should be a way to get some information that the assignment is passed on Coursera page.

Excellent course. The proofs that are laid out in a way that made it easy for me to follow along, and it gave me a good overview of the areas of cryptography that are most relevant to me.