CS 7934 — Computer Systems Seminar, Spring 2016

Fridays, 2:00–3:30 PM, 3485 MEB

Instructor: Eric Eide

Schedule

Week Date Topic(s) Facilitator(s) Paper(s)
1 1/15 Eide no meeting — organizational email
2 1/22 malware triage Eide BitShred: Feature Hashing Malware for Scalable Triage and Semantic Analysis. Jiyong Jang et al. In CCS ’11, Oct. 2011.
3 1/29 I/O virtualization Jacobsen A Comprehensive Implementation and Evaluation of Direct Interrupt Delivery. Cheng-Chun Tu et al. In VEE ’15, Mar. 2015.
4 2/5 kernel design and security Bauer ret2dir: Rethinking Kernel Isolation. Vasileios P. Kemerlis et al. In USENIX Security ’14, Aug. 2014.
5 2/12 software-defined networking Johnson Participatory Networking: An API for Application Control of SDNs. Andrew D. Ferguson et al. In SIGCOMM ’13, Aug. 2013.
(Oops, a repeat! We previously read this paper in spring 2014.)
6 2/19 no meeting — student research posters
7 2/26 private messaging Wong Vuvuzela: Scalable Private Messaging Resistant to Traffic Analysis. Jelle van den Hooff et al. In SOSP ’15, Oct. 2015.
8 3/4 analysis of an Internet census Duerig An Internet Census Taken by an Illegal Botnet — A Qualitative Assessment of Published Measurements. Thomas Krenc et al. ACM SIGCOMM CCR, 44(3):103–111, Jul. 2014.
9 3/11 provenance Eide Trustworthy Whole-System Provenance for the Linux Kernel. Adam Bates et al. In USENIX Security ’15, Aug. 2015.
10 3/18 no meeting — University spring break
11 3/25 cellular networks Webb Beyond the Radio: Illuminating the Higher Layers of Mobile Networks. Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez et al. In MobiSys ’15, May 2015.
12 4/1 bare-metal clouds Jacobsen Improving Agility and Elasticity in Bare-metal Clouds. Yushi Omote et al. In ASPLOS ’15, Mar. 2015.
13 4/8 security in SDNs Baek Poisoning Network Visibility in Software-Defined Networks: New Attacks and Countermeasures. Sungmin Hong et al. In NDSS ’15, Feb. 2015.
14 4/15 VMI Li SoK: Introspections on Trust and the Semantic Gap. Jain et al. In IEEE S&P ’14, May 2014.
15 4/22 first-class virtual address spaces Hibler SpaceJMP: Programming with Multiple Virtual Address Spaces. Izzat El Hajj et al. In ASPLOS ’16, Apr. 2016.
16 4/27 hash all the things! Eide Wednesday 4/27 at 12:00 PM:
Cryptographically Secure Page Numbering in LaTeX. William Gunther and Brian Kell. In SIGBOVIK ’16, Apr. 2016.

Overview

The spring 2016 offering of CS 7934 will cover a variety of systems topics, with an eye toward two goals.

The first is to increase participants' familiarity with recent and important results in the area of computer systems research. Attendees will read and discuss papers from recent and imminent top-tier systems conferences: e.g., SOSP, OSDI, NSDI, SIGCOMM, FAST, systems-related security conferences, and so on. Attendees will typically discuss one paper each week. Papers will be selected for their relevance to participants' research or upcoming Utah visitors. In contrast to some recent offerings of the seminar, there is no preset “focus topic” for spring 2016. One can anticipate, however, that the semester will include discussions about operating systems, distributed systems, cloud computing, datacenters, networking, and security.

The second is to be a venue for student presentations. Every student participating in the seminar will be required to lead at least one meeting during the semester. This may be a “formal” research presentation—ideally of a student's current work—or it may be an analysis of the research papers chosen for a seminar meeting.

CS 7934 is often called “the CSL seminar.” The name CSL is historic.

Mailing list

To get on the class mailing list, use Mailman to subscribe to csl-sem.

Syllabus

The course syllabus contains important information for students, including the course's policies on grading and cheating.

Credit

Students may enroll for one (1) credit. Although the University lists the course as “variable credit,” the two- and three-credit options are not currently available. Please contact the instructor if you would be interested in enrolling for more than one credit.

Those taking the course for credit must read all of the assigned papers, submit a short summary of each assigned paper prior to class (PDF, LaTeX), participate in each discussion, and facilitate at least one seminar meeting during the semester. Refer to the syllabus for further information.

Potential Papers

Upcoming and recent conference proceedings are good sources of papers for discussion. Below are links to some relevant conference series.

Past CSL Seminars

Semester Focus Topic(s)
Fall 2015 no focus topic chosen; many systems security papers
Spring 2015 no focus topic chosen
Fall 2014 no focus topic chosen; many OSDI ’14 papers
Spring 2014 no focus topic chosen; many systems security papers
Fall 2013 no focus topic chosen; many SOSP ’13 papers
Spring 2013 reversible and “time-traveling” debugging
Fall 2012 modern networking and network management; peer-review process
Spring 2012 systems approaches to dynamic problem detection and repair
Fall 2011 datacenter architectures and issues
Spring 2011 malicious software, i.e., malware
Fall 2010 systems approaches to security
Spring 2010 testbed-like infrastructures for cloud computing and scientific computing
Fall 2009 no focus topic chosen; many SOSP ’09 papers
Fall 2008 no focus topic chosen; many OSDI ’08 papers
Summer 2008 no focus topic chosen; informal biweekly meetings
Spring 2008 no focus topic chosen
Fall 2007 no focus topic chosen; many SOSP ’07 papers
Fall 2006 no focus topic chosen; many OSDI ’06 papers
Fall 2005 no focus topic chosen; many SOSP ’05 papers
Spring 2005 no focus topic chosen; many NSDI ’05 papers

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