Below follows a day-by-day calendar for the class, including reading assignments, lecture topics, and courseworks. All lectures are delivered in person. Office hours are delivered through some combination of in person and live (synchronously) over Zoom. Links to any Zoom office hours sessions appear on the calendar on the date when they take place. Lecture notes and lecture recordings will be posted within 24 hours 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 | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday |
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2nd Oct Before first lecture! |
3rd Oct Course Introduction Lecture Notes: |
4th Oct |
5th Oct Design: Worse Is Better; Reading: Worse Is Better Lecture Notes: |
6th Oct |
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9th Oct |
10th Oct Concurrent I/O Lecture Notes: |
11th Oct |
12th Oct NFS Reading: NFS Case Study (accessible only through UCL IS account) Reading: Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem Lecture Notes: |
13th Oct |
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16th Oct |
17th Oct NFS (cont'd) RPC and Transparency Lecture Notes: |
18th Oct |
19th Oct RPC and Transparency (cont'd); Coursework Background Reading: Coursework 0 Out: Coursework 1 Out: |
20th Oct 5 - 7 PM, 188 Tottenham Court Road, Room 01/02 Ivy: Distributed Shared Memory Reading: Ivy Lecture Notes: |
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23rd Oct |
24th Oct No lecture |
25th Oct |
26th Oct No lecture |
27th Oct 5 - 7 PM, 188 Tottenham Court Road, Room 01/02 Two-Phase Commit Lecture Notes: |
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30th Oct |
31st Oct Paxos Reading: Paxos Lecture Notes: |
1st Nov |
2nd Nov Bayou: Weak Connectivity and Update Conflicts Reading: Bayou Lecture Notes: |
3rd Nov |
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6th Nov Reading week |
7th Nov Reading week; no lecture today! |
8th Nov Reading week |
9th Nov Reading week; no lecture today! |
10th Nov Reading week Coursework 1 Due: 4 PM |
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13th Nov |
14th Nov GFS: The Google File System Reading: GFS Lecture Notes: |
15th Nov |
16th Nov Busy Servers: Receive Livelock Reading: Eliminating Receive Livelock Lecture Notes: |
17th Nov Introduction to Security; Lecture Notes: Lecture Notes: |
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20th Nov |
21st Nov Cryptographic Primitives I (cont'd); Lecture Notes: |
22nd Nov |
23rd Nov No lecture |
24th Nov |
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27th Nov |
28th Nov The Kerberos Authentication Service Reading: Kerberos Lecture Notes: Coursework 2 Out: |
29th Nov |
30th Nov Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) Lecture Notes: |
1st Dec 5 - 7 PM, Bentham House LG17 Reasoning Formally about Authentication: TAOS Reading: TAOS Lecture Notes: Software Vulnerabilities and Exploits Reading: Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit Reading: Exploiting Format String Vulnerabilities Reading: Once Upon a free() Lecture Notes: |
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4th Dec |
5th Dec Vulnerabilities and Exploits (cont'd) |
6th Dec |
7th Dec Preventing Exploits Reading: TaintCheck Reading: PaX Overview Reading: ASLR Overview Reading: Limits of Address Space Randomization Lecture Notes: |
8th Dec |
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11th Dec |
12th Dec Containing Buggy Code: Software-based Fault Isolation; Reading: SFI Reading: OKWS Lecture Notes: Lecture Notes: |
13th Dec |
14th Dec CPU Speculation vs. Isolation: Meltdown Reading: Meltdown Lecture Notes: |
15th Dec Coursework 2 Due: 4 PM |