Below follows a day-by-day calendar for the class, including reading assignments, lecture topics, and courseworks. Lecture notes will be posted immediately after each lecture.
Class meetings consist largely of discussions of research papers. They are designed under the assumption that students have already read the assigned papers. If you do not read the papers that appear on a day of the calendar before that day's lecture, you are likely to have difficulty following the lecture and discussion.
N.B. that all assigned readings are examinable.
| Monday | Wednesday | Friday |
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30th Sep Course Introduction Lecture Notes: |
2nd Oct Design: Worse Is Better; Reading: Worse Is Better Lecture Notes: |
4th Oct |
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7th Oct NFS Reading: NFS Case Study (accessible only through UCL IS account) Reading: Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem Lecture Notes: |
9th Oct RPC and Transparency Lecture Notes: |
11th Oct |
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14th Oct Ivy: Distributed Shared Memory; Reading: Ivy Coursework Background Reading: Coursework 1 Out: Lecture Notes: |
16th Oct Two-Phase Commit Lecture Notes: |
18th Oct |
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21st Oct Paxos Reading: Paxos Lecture Notes: |
23rd Oct Bayou: Weak Connectivity and Update Conflicts Reading: Bayou Lecture Notes: |
25th Oct GFS: The Google File System Reading: GFS Lecture Notes: |
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28th Oct No lecture today! |
30th Oct No lecture today! |
1st Nov Busy Servers: Receive Livelock Reading: Eliminating Receive Livelock Lecture Notes: |
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4th Nov Reading week; no lecture today! Coursework 1 Due: 11:05 AM |
6th Nov Reading week; no lecture today! |
8th Nov |
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11th Nov Introduction to Security; Lecture Notes: |
13th Nov Cryptographic Primitives I Lecture Notes: |
15th Nov |
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18th Nov Cryptographic Primitives II Lecture Notes: The Kerberos Authentication Service Reading: Kerberos Lecture Notes: |
20th Nov Kerberos (cont'd) |
22nd Nov Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) Lecture Notes: Coursework 2 Out: |
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25th Nov Reasoning Formally about Authentication: TAOS Reading: TAOS Lecture Notes: |
27th Nov No lecture today! |
29th Nov |
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2nd Dec Software Vulnerabilities and Exploits Reading: Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit Reading: Exploiting Format String Vulnerabilities Reading: Once Upon a free() Lecture Notes: |
4th Dec Preventing Exploits Reading: TaintCheck Reading: PaX Overview Reading: ASLR Overview Reading: Limits of Address Space Randomization Lecture Notes: |
6th Dec Containing Buggy Code: Software-based Fault Isolation Reading: SFI Lecture Notes: |
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9th Dec OKWS: Approximating Least Privilege in a Real-World Web Server Reading: OKWS Lecture Notes: |
11th Dec CPU Speculation vs. Isolation: Meltdown Reading: Meltdown Lecture Notes: |
13th Dec Coursework 2 Due: 5:05 PM |