The Summer 2026 cohort for our Applied Cryptography online program has been selected, and we are absolutely delighted with who is coming! Fifty students drawn from across Lebanon’s computer-science landscape will join us online from June 9 through October 10 for a full semester of modern cryptography, taught the way we teach it at AUB.
This is a real, full-featured university course delivered completely free to Lebanese students. Every accepted applicant brings something different and exciting to the group, and we can already tell this is going to be a fantastic cohort to teach.
What the course covers
Applied Cryptography is a comprehensive, two-part course. Part 1 builds the theoretical foundations of modern cryptography from first principles: pseudorandomness, chosen-plaintext and chosen-ciphertext security, collision-resistant hash functions, hard problems and Diffie-Hellman, elliptic curves, and digital signatures, all developed inside a rigorous provable-security framework. Part 2 then applies that foundation to the systems that actually run the modern internet: TLS, the cautionary tale of RC4, secure messaging protocols like Signal, end-to-end encrypted cloud storage, high-assurance cryptographic implementations, post-quantum cryptography, cryptocurrency cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, secure multiparty computation, and fully homomorphic encryption. Eighteen topics in total, paced over a full semester.
Around the lectures sits a serious problem-set program (eight problem sets, paced with the topics) and a hands-on project track. Students choose one or two projects from a menu of eight: build a password manager, design a secure messenger, formally verify a TLS-like protocol in ProVerif, implement a zero-knowledge Battleship game, migrate a system to post-quantum cryptography, build private set intersection for contact discovery, design a privacy-preserving age verification system, or construct a time-locked message capsule. The implementation languages are Go and Rust, and the course ships Go and Rust starter kits so students can get writing code from day one.
There is also a four-week rotating schedule running alongside the technical content. Week 1 is a paper deep dive, where the cohort tears apart a seminal or recent cryptography paper together. Week 2 is student presentations, with 15-minute talks and lightning talks. Week 3 is a writing workshop on technical and academic writing, including LaTeX, audit reports, and security disclosures. Week 4 is a career café with guest speakers from industry and academia. The goal is to send students out of the semester with cryptographic knowledge, plus the surrounding skills the field actually needs.
The full setup, including the two required textbooks (Mike Rosulek’s The Joy of Cryptography and Jean-Philippe Aumasson’s Serious Cryptography, 2nd Edition), the extensive reading list of around ninety research papers and technical resources, problem-set specifications, and project briefs, is all available on the course website under a Creative Commons license. Everyone is welcome to use it, cohort or not.
What an opportunity this is
Lebanon has a remarkable density of talented computer-science students. Dedicated cryptography coursework is not always easy to come by, and the gap between a standard undergraduate curriculum and what is needed to do serious work in the field can be a wide one to cross alone. Applied Cryptography 2026 is built to help close that gap, no matter which Lebanese university you happen to be enrolled at, and at no cost.
A few fun snapshots of the cohort
We thought it would be fun to share a quick demographic look at the group of fifty before the course kicks off. Nothing scientific, just some incidental snapshots.
Where they study
- Lebanese University23 · 46%
- American University of Beirut17 · 34%
- Non-Lebanese5 · 10%
- Saint-Joseph University2 · 4%
- Lebanese International U.1 · 2%
- Islamic University of Lebanon1 · 2%
- University of Balamand1 · 2%
A nice spread across the Lebanese university landscape, with the Lebanese University and AUB contributing the most students. The five non-Lebanese admits joined us through instructor discretion as exceptional cases, and most of them are from the Middle East and North Africa region: a Tunisian graduate student at the EPFL/ETH joint program in Zurich, a Syrian formal-verification specialist, and a Lebanese national pursuing a PhD in Luxembourg. The other two come from further afield: a graduate student from Latin America and a career applied-cryptography engineer based in the UK.
Gender
- Male34 · 68%
- Female16 · 32%
Roughly a third of the cohort is women, which sits a touch above the typical Lebanese-engineering-school baseline, and we are happy to see that and committed to pushing it higher in future editions.
What the cohort brings to the room
This cohort is bringing a wild range of accomplishments to the table. Graduate-level coursework, peer-reviewed publications, formal-verification contributions to widely deployed protocols, CTF placements, applied-cryptography builds already in users’ hands, and several founded companies and initiatives. We cannot wait to see what this group does together over the summer.
See you on June 9
Lectures run Tuesdays and Fridays, 11:00 to 12:30 Beirut time. To the admitted students: congratulations, welcome aboard, and we will see you in three weeks for what is going to be a really fun semester.
To everyone else: every piece of course material is publicly available on the course website under Creative Commons, so you can follow along at your own pace. And we plan to run the program again. Come back next year!