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

29th Sep (Medawar G01 Lankester LT)

Course Introduction;
OS Concepts

Lecture Notes:
Class Intro

Lecture Notes:
OS Intro

1st Oct

Design: Worse Is Better;
Concurrent I/O

Reading: Worse Is Better

Lecture Notes:
I/O Concurrency

3rd Oct (1-19 Torrington 115 Galton LT)

NFS

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

Reading: Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem

Lecture Notes:
NFS

6th Oct

No lecture today!

8th Oct

No lecture today!

10th Oct (Pearson G22 LT)
5 - 7 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, 31st October 2014

Lecture Notes:
RPC and Transparency

13th Oct (Chandler G10)

Ivy: Distributed Shared Memory

Reading: Ivy

Lecture Notes:
Ivy and DSM

15th Oct

Two-Phase Commit

Lecture Notes:
Two-Phase Commit

17th Oct

20th Oct (Roberts 421)

Paxos

Reading: Paxos

Lecture Notes:
Paxos

22nd Oct

Bayou: Weak Connectivity and Update Conflicts

Reading: Bayou

Lecture Notes:
Bayou

24th Oct (1-19 Torrington 115 Galton LT)

GFS: The Google File System

Reading: GFS

Lecture Notes:
GFS

27th Oct

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

29th Oct

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

31st Oct (Pearson G22 LT)

Busy Servers: Receive Livelock

Reading: Eliminating Receive Livelock

Lecture Notes:
Eliminating Receive Livelock

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

3rd Nov

Reading week; no lecture today!

5th Nov

Reading week; no lecture today!

7th Nov

10th Nov
Non-standard room and time
Chandler B02, 11 AM

Introduction to Security;
User Authentication

Lecture Notes:
Introduction to Security

12th Nov

Cryptographic Primitives I

Lecture Notes:
Cryptographic Primitives I

14th Nov

17th Nov

Cryptographic Primitives II

Lecture Notes:
Cryptographic Primitives II

The Kerberos Authentication Service

Reading: Kerberos

Lecture Notes:
Kerberos

19th Nov

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

Lecture Notes:
SSL/TLS

21st Nov

24th Nov

Reasoning Formally about Authentication: TAOS

Reading: TAOS

Lecture Notes:
TAOS

Coursework 2 Out:
Security Problem Set
due in lecture, 9:35 AM, Wednesday, 10th December 2014

26th Nov

No lecture today!

28th Nov

1st 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:
Vulnerabilities and Exploits

3rd Dec

Preventing Exploits

Reading: TaintCheck

Reading: PaX Overview

Reading: ASLR Overview

Reading: Limits of Address Space Randomization

Lecture Notes:
Preventing Exploits

5th Dec

8th Dec

Containing Buggy Code: Software-based Fault Isolation

Reading: SFI

Lecture Notes:
SFI

10th Dec

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

Reading: OKWS

Lecture Notes:
OKWS and Least Privilege

12th Dec