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 Lecture Notes: |
3rd Oct No lecture today! |
5th Oct |
8th Oct No lecture today! |
10th Oct No lecture today! |
12th Oct Design: Worse Is Better; Reading: Worse Is Better Lecture Notes: |
15th Oct NFS Reading: NFS Case Study (accessible only through UCL IS account) Reading: Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem Lecture Notes: |
17th Oct RPC and Transparency Lecture Notes: |
19th Oct Ivy: Distributed Shared Memory; Reading: Ivy Coursework Background Reading: Coursework 1 Out: Lecture Notes: |
22nd Oct Two-Phase Commit Lecture Notes: |
24th Oct Paxos Reading: Paxos Lecture Notes: |
26th Oct Bayou: Weak Connectivity and Update Conflicts Reading: Bayou Lecture Notes: |
29th Oct GFS: The Google File System Reading: GFS Lecture Notes: |
31st Oct Busy Servers: Receive Livelock Reading: Eliminating Receive Livelock Lecture Notes: |
2nd Nov |
5th Nov Reading week; no lecture today! |
7th Nov Reading week; no lecture today! |
9th Nov |
12th Nov Introduction to Security; Lecture Notes: Coursework 1 Due, 11:05 AM |
14th Nov Cryptographic Primitives I Lecture Notes: |
16th Nov |
19th Nov Cryptographic Primitives II Lecture Notes: The Kerberos Authentication Service Reading: Kerberos Lecture Notes: |
21st Nov No lecture today! |
23rd Nov |
26th Nov Kerberos (cont'd) Coursework 2 Out: |
28th Nov Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) Lecture Notes: |
30th Nov Reasoning Formally about Authentication: TAOS Reading: TAOS Lecture Notes: |
3rd 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: |
5th Dec Preventing Exploits Reading: TaintCheck Reading: PaX Overview Reading: ASLR Overview Reading: Limits of Address Space Randomization Lecture Notes: |
7th Dec Containing Buggy Code: Software-based Fault Isolation Reading: SFI Lecture Notes: |
10th Dec OKWS: Approximating Least Privilege in a Real-World Web Server Reading: OKWS Lecture Notes: |
12th Dec CPU Speculation vs. Isolation: Meltdown Reading: Meltdown Lecture Notes: |
14th Dec Coursework 2 Due in lecture: 5:05 PM |