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 |
2nd Oct Course Introduction Lecture Notes: |
4th Oct Design: Worse Is Better; Reading: Worse Is Better Lecture Notes: |
6th Oct NFS Reading: NFS Case Study (accessible only through UCL IS account) Reading: Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem Lecture Notes: |
9th Oct No lecture today! |
11th Oct RPC and Transparency Lecture Notes: |
13th Oct Ivy: Distributed Shared Memory; Reading: Ivy Coursework Background Reading: Coursework 1 Out: Lecture Notes: |
16th Oct Two-Phase Commit Lecture Notes: |
18th Oct Paxos Reading: Paxos Lecture Notes: |
20th Oct Bayou: Weak Connectivity and Update Conflicts Reading: Bayou Lecture Notes: |
23rd Oct GFS: The Google File System Reading: GFS Lecture Notes: |
25th Oct Busy Servers: Receive Livelock Reading: Eliminating Receive Livelock Lecture Notes: |
27th Oct |
30th Oct No lecture today! |
1st Nov No lecture today! Coursework 1 Due, 9:35 AM |
3rd Nov |
6th Nov Reading week; no lecture today! |
8th Nov Reading week; no lecture today! |
10th Nov |
13th Nov Introduction to Security; Lecture Notes: |
15th Nov Cryptographic Primitives I Lecture Notes: |
17th Nov Cryptographic Primitives II Lecture Notes: The Kerberos Authentication Service Reading: Kerberos Lecture Notes: |
20th Nov Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Lecture Notes: Coursework 2 Out: |
22nd Nov No lecture today! |
24th Nov |
27th Nov Reasoning Formally about Authentication: TAOS Reading: TAOS Lecture Notes: |
29th Nov No lecture today! |
1st Dec |
4th Dec Non-standard room and
time Software Vulnerabilities and Exploits Reading: Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit Reading: Exploiting Format String Vulnerabilities Reading: Once Upon a free() Lecture Notes: |
6th Dec Preventing Exploits Reading: TaintCheck Reading: PaX Overview Reading: ASLR Overview Reading: Limits of Address Space Randomization Lecture Notes: |
8th Dec |
11th Dec Containing Buggy Code: Software-based Fault Isolation Reading: SFI Lecture Notes: |
13th Dec OKWS: Approximating Least Privilege in a Real-World Web Server Reading: OKWS Lecture Notes: Coursework 2 Due in lecture: 9:35 AM |
15th Dec |