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 |
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4th Oct No lecture today! |
6th Oct No lecture today! |
8th Oct Course Introduction; Lecture Notes: Lecture Notes: |
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11th Oct Design: Worse Is Better; Reading: Worse Is Better Lecture Notes: |
13th Oct NFS Reading: NFS Case Study (accessible only through UCL IS account) Reading: Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem Lecture Notes: |
15th Oct RPC and Transparency; Mark Handley's Intro to C for Java Programmers Coursework 1 Out: Lecture Notes: |
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18th Oct Ivy: Distributed Shared Memory Reading: Ivy Lecture Notes: |
20th Oct No lecture today! |
22nd Oct |
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25th Oct No lecture today! |
27th Oct Two-Phase Commit Lecture Notes: |
29th Oct Paxos Reading: Paxos Lecture Notes: |
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1st Nov Bayou: Weak Connectivity and Update Conflicts Reading: Bayou Lecture Notes: |
3rd Nov GFS: The Google File System Reading: GFS Lecture Notes: |
5th Nov No lecture today! Coursework 1 Due, 12 noon |
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8th Nov Reading week; no lecture today! |
10th Nov Reading week; no lecture today! |
12th Nov |
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15th Nov RouteBricks: Cluster-Based IP Router Reading: RouteBricks Lecture Notes: |
17th Nov Introduction to Security; Lecture Notes: |
19th Nov |
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22nd Nov Cryptographic Primitives I Lecture Notes: |
24th Nov Cryptographic Primitives II Lecture Notes: The Kerberos Authentication Service Reading: Kerberos Lecture Notes: |
26th Nov |
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29th Nov Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Lecture Notes: |
1st Dec Reasoning Formally about Authentication: TAOS Reading: TAOS Lecture Notes: Coursework 2 Out: |
3rd Dec |
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6th 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: |
8th Dec Preventing Exploits Reading: TaintCheck Reading: PaX Overview Reading: ASLR Overview Reading: Limits of Address Space Randomization Lecture Notes: |
10th Dec |
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13th Dec Containing Buggy Code: Software-based Fault Isolation Reading: SFI Lecture Notes: |
15th Dec OKWS: Approximating Least Privilege in a Real-World Web Server Reading: OKWS Lecture Notes: Coursework 2 Due in lecture: 9:05 AM |
17th Dec |