2025 LLCipher summer students learn cryptography
In early August, twenty-five high school students from across the country came to the Beaver Works Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the annual Lincoln Laboratory Cipher (LLCipher) summer workshop. Taught by Laboratory staff, this one-week course offers an introductory look into theoretical cryptography while guiding students on how to build secure encryption schemes and digital signatures. The class gives students who are interested in cybersecurity and mathematics the chance to gain a conceptual understanding of the problems that cryptography aims to solve. Students do not need an extensive background in algebra to participate.
Noah Luther from the Laboratory's Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group, who taught the fourth day of the course in which students develop protocols for communicating securely, has served as an LLCipher instructor for 8 years.
"The curriculum leaves lots of opportunities for students to propose ways of fitting together the tools they’ve learned about to solve the next problem that I’m posing," he says. "The best part of teaching the course is when students anticipate what I’m going to explain before I write it up for them."
The course mixes classroom sessions and workshops, and includes tours of Laboratory facilities and a talk from an MIT admissions counselor about campus life and the college admissions process. Students apply to gain entry to the course, which is free.
Joshna Iyengar, also from the Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group, taught the second day of the program, when students learn key cryptography concepts to help them understand the meaning of "secure" and "secret."
"Teaching cryptography to high schoolers is especially exciting because this topic is not commonly taught at that age, yet they can absolutely learn and have fun with it," she says. "Anyone who enjoyed doing Legos or math or talking in spy code as a kid would probably find cryptography fascinating, and this program teaches concepts you should learn to continue doing this type of work."
