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 |
5th Oct No lecture today! |
7th Oct No lecture today! |
9th Oct Course Introduction; Lecture Notes: Lecture Notes: |
12th Oct Design: Worse Is Better; Reading: Worse Is Better Lecture Notes: |
14th Oct NFS Reading: NFS Case Study (accessible only through UCL IS account) Reading: Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem Lecture Notes: |
16th Oct RPC and Transparency; Coursework Background Reading: Coursework 1 Out: Lecture Notes: |
19th Oct Ivy: Distributed Shared Memory Reading: Ivy Lecture Notes: |
21st Oct Two-Phase Commit Lecture Notes: |
23rd Oct |
26th Oct Paxos Reading: Paxos Lecture Notes: |
28th Oct Bayou: Weak Connectivity and Update Conflicts Reading: Bayou Lecture Notes: |
30th Oct |
2nd Nov GFS: The Google File System Reading: GFS Lecture Notes: |
4th Nov Busy Servers: Receive Livelock Reading: Eliminating Receive Livelock Lecture Notes: |
6th Nov Coursework 1 Due, 5:05 PM |
9th Nov Reading week; no lecture today! |
11th Nov Reading week; no lecture today! |
13th Nov |
16th Nov Introduction to Security; Lecture Notes: |
18th Nov Cryptographic Primitives I Lecture Notes: |
20th Nov Cryptographic Primitives II Lecture Notes: The Kerberos Authentication Service Reading: Kerberos Lecture Notes: |
23rd Nov Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Lecture Notes: |
25th Nov No lecture today! |
27th Nov |
30th Nov No lecture today! |
2nd Dec Non-standard room Reasoning Formally about Authentication: TAOS Reading: TAOS Lecture Notes: Coursework 2 Out: |
4th Dec |
7th 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: |
9th Dec Preventing Exploits Reading: TaintCheck Reading: PaX Overview Reading: ASLR Overview Reading: Limits of Address Space Randomization Lecture Notes: |
11th Dec Non-standard room and
time Containing Buggy Code: Software-based Fault Isolation Reading: SFI Lecture Notes: |
14th Dec OKWS: Approximating Least Privilege in a Real-World Web Server Reading: OKWS Lecture Notes: Coursework 2 Due in lecture: 11:05 AM |
16th Dec No lecture today! |
18th Dec |