M030/GZ03: Calendar

Detailed Class Calendar

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

1st Oct

Course Introduction;
OS Concepts

Lecture Notes:
Class Intro

Lecture Notes:
OS Intro

3rd Oct

Design: Worse Is Better;
Concurrent I/O

Reading: Worse Is Better

Lecture Notes:
I/O Concurrency

5th Oct
Non-standard room and time
MPEB 1.03, 5 PM

NFS

Reading: NFS Case Study (accessible only through UCL IS account)

Reading: Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem

Lecture Notes:
NFS

8th Oct

No lecture today!

10th Oct

No lecture today!

12th Oct
Non-standard room and time
MPEB 1.03, 5 PM

RPC and Transparency;
Programming Coursework Background

Coursework Background Reading:
Mark Handley's Intro to C for Java Programmers

Coursework 1 Out:
Programming a Distributed Tickertape
due 5:05 PM, 2nd November 2012

Lecture Notes:
RPC and Transparency

15th Oct

Ivy: Distributed Shared Memory

Reading: Ivy

Lecture Notes:
Ivy and DSM

17th Oct

Two-Phase Commit

Lecture Notes:
Two-Phase Commit

19th Oct

22nd Oct
Non-standard room and time
Central House G01, 5 PM

Paxos

Reading: Paxos

Lecture Notes:
Paxos

24th Oct

Bayou: Weak Connectivity and Update Conflicts

Reading: Bayou

Lecture Notes:
Bayou

26th Oct

29th Oct

No lecture today!
(Hacking day; work on Coursework 1)

31st Oct

No lecture today!
(Hacking day; work on Coursework 1)

2nd Nov

No lecture today!
(Hacking day; work on Coursework 1)

Coursework 1 Due, 5:05 PM
electronic submission (via Moodle)

5th Nov

Reading week; no lecture today!

7th Nov

Reading week; no lecture today!

9th Nov

12th Nov

GFS: The Google File System

Reading: GFS

Lecture Notes:
GFS

14th Nov

Busy Servers: Receive Livelock

Reading: Eliminating Receive Livelock

Lecture Notes:
Eliminating Receive Livelock

16th Nov
Non-standard room and time
MPEB 1.03, 5 PM

Introduction to Security;
User Authentication

Lecture Notes:
Introduction to Security

19th Nov

Cryptographic Primitives I

Lecture Notes:
Cryptographic Primitives I

21st Nov

Cryptographic Primitives II

Lecture Notes:
Cryptographic Primitives II

The Kerberos Authentication Service

Reading: Kerberos

Lecture Notes:
Kerberos

23rd Nov

26th Nov

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

Lecture Notes:
SSL/TLS

28th Nov

Reasoning Formally about Authentication: TAOS

Reading: TAOS

Lecture Notes:
TAOS

Coursework 2 Out:
Security Problem Set
due in lecture, 9:05 AM, Wednesday, 12th December 2012

30th Nov

Non-standard room and time
MPEB 1.03, 5 PM

Software Vulnerabilities and Exploits

Reading: Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit

Reading: Exploiting Format String Vulnerabilities

Reading: Once Upon a free()

Lecture Notes:
Vulnerabilities and Exploits

3rd Dec

No lecture today!

5th Dec

No lecture today!

7th Dec

Non-standard room and time
MPEB 1.03, 5 PM

Preventing Exploits

Reading: TaintCheck

Reading: PaX Overview

Reading: ASLR Overview

Reading: Limits of Address Space Randomization

Lecture Notes:
Preventing Exploits

10th Dec

Containing Buggy Code: Software-based Fault Isolation

Reading: SFI

Lecture Notes:
SFI

12th Dec

OKWS: Approximating Least Privilege in a Real-World Web Server

Reading: OKWS

Lecture Notes:
OKWS and Least Privilege

Coursework 2 Due in lecture: 9:05 AM

14th Dec