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

3rd Oct

Course Introduction

Lecture Notes:
Class Intro

5th Oct

Design: Worse Is Better;
OS Concepts;
Concurrent I/O

Reading: Worse Is Better

Lecture Notes:
OS Intro
I/O Concurrency

7th Oct

NFS

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

Reading: Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem

Lecture Notes:
NFS

10th Oct

No lecture today!

12th Oct

No lecture today!

14th Oct

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, 4th November 2016

Lecture Notes:
RPC and Transparency

17th Oct

Ivy: Distributed Shared Memory

Reading: Ivy

Lecture Notes:
Ivy and DSM

19th Oct

Two-Phase Commit

Lecture Notes:
Two-Phase Commit

21st Oct

24th Oct

Paxos

Reading: Paxos

Lecture Notes:
Paxos

26th Oct

Bayou: Weak Connectivity and Update Conflicts

Reading: Bayou

Lecture Notes:
Bayou

28th Oct

31st Oct

GFS: The Google File System

Reading: GFS

Lecture Notes:
GFS

2nd Nov

Busy Servers: Receive Livelock

Reading: Eliminating Receive Livelock

Lecture Notes:
Eliminating Receive Livelock

4th Nov

Commuter: Scalability and OS API Commutativity

Reading: Commuter

Lecture Notes:
Commuter Background and Intro
Austin Clements's SOSP 2013 slides

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

7th Nov

Reading week; no lecture today!

9th Nov

Reading week; no lecture today!

11th Nov

14th Nov

Introduction to Security;
User Authentication

Lecture Notes:
Introduction to Security

16th Nov

Cryptographic Primitives I

Lecture Notes:
Cryptographic Primitives I

18th Nov

21st Nov

No lecture today!

23rd Nov

No lecture today!

25th Nov

28th Nov

Cryptographic Primitives II

Lecture Notes:
Cryptographic Primitives II

The Kerberos Authentication Service

Reading: Kerberos

Lecture Notes:
Kerberos

30th Nov

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

Lecture Notes:
SSL/TLS

Coursework 2 Out:
Security Problem Set
due in lecture, 5:05 PM, Friday, 16th December 2016

2nd Dec

5th Dec

Reasoning Formally about Authentication: TAOS

Reading: TAOS

Lecture Notes:
TAOS

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:
Vulnerabilities and Exploits

9th Dec

Preventing Exploits

Reading: TaintCheck

Reading: PaX Overview

Reading: ASLR Overview

Reading: Limits of Address Space Randomization

Lecture Notes:
Preventing Exploits

12th Dec

Containing Buggy Code: Software-based Fault Isolation

Reading: SFI

Lecture Notes:
SFI

14th Dec

No lecture today!

16th Dec

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

Reading: OKWS

Lecture Notes:
OKWS and Least Privilege

Coursework 2 Due in lecture: 5:05 PM