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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3rd Oct Course Introduction Lecture Notes: |
5th Oct Design: Worse Is Better; Reading: Worse Is Better Lecture Notes: |
7th Oct NFS Reading: NFS Case Study (accessible only through UCL IS account) Reading: Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem Lecture Notes: |
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10th Oct No lecture today! |
12th Oct No lecture today! |
14th Oct RPC and Transparency; Coursework Background Reading: Coursework 1 Out: Lecture Notes: |
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17th Oct Ivy: Distributed Shared Memory Reading: Ivy Lecture Notes: |
19th Oct Two-Phase Commit Lecture Notes: |
21st Oct |
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24th Oct Paxos Reading: Paxos Lecture Notes: |
26th Oct Bayou: Weak Connectivity and Update Conflicts Reading: Bayou Lecture Notes: |
28th Oct |
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31st Oct GFS: The Google File System Reading: GFS Lecture Notes: |
2nd Nov Busy Servers: Receive Livelock Reading: Eliminating Receive Livelock Lecture Notes: |
4th Nov Commuter: Scalability and OS API Commutativity Reading: Commuter Lecture Notes: Coursework 1 Due, 5:05 PM |
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7th Nov Reading week; no lecture today! |
9th Nov Reading week; no lecture today! |
11th Nov |
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14th Nov Introduction to Security; Lecture Notes: |
16th Nov Cryptographic Primitives I Lecture Notes: |
18th Nov |
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21st Nov No lecture today! |
23rd Nov No lecture today! |
25th Nov |
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28th Nov Cryptographic Primitives II Lecture Notes: The Kerberos Authentication Service Reading: Kerberos Lecture Notes: |
30th Nov Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Lecture Notes: Coursework 2 Out: |
2nd Dec |
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5th Dec Reasoning Formally about Authentication: TAOS Reading: TAOS Lecture Notes: |
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: |
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12th Dec Containing Buggy Code: Software-based Fault Isolation Reading: SFI Lecture Notes: |
14th Dec No lecture today! |
16th Dec OKWS: Approximating Least Privilege in a Real-World Web Server Reading: OKWS Lecture Notes: Coursework 2 Due in lecture: 5:05 PM |