COMP 436/536 - Secure and Cloud Computing

Instructor: Ang Chen
Lectures: 4:00-5:15pm, MW
Location: HRZ 212
Piazza: link

Course description

What is "cloud computing"? How do we build cloud-scale systems and components that are secure against malicious attacks, and scale to millions of users? Many of today's services run inside the cloud -- a set of geographically distributed data centers running heterogeneous software stacks. Cloud systems must scale across tens of thousands of machines, support millions of concurrent requests, and they must do so with high security guarantees. This course will start with the fundamentals of cloud computing, introduce key techniques in building scalable and secure systems, and expose students to state-of-the-art research advances as well as emerging security threats and defenses in today's cloud systems.

Prerequisites

COMP 321 (Introduction to Computer Systems)

Format

We will have two lectures per week. There will also be regular homework assignments and a course project that requires a significant amount of hands-on implementation, experimental validation, as well as a report.

Grading

Homework 40%, quizzes 30%, project 30%.

Homework assignments

The homework assignments will be available at Piazza. You can submit the solutions via Email. Please email your solutions to myself and all TAs.

Accomodations

Students with a documented disability needing academic adjustments or accommodations in this course are encouraged to contact me and Disability Support Services in the Allen Center, Room 111.

Tentative schedule (see Piazza for due dates)

Topic	Details	Reading	Remarks
1. Introduction	Principles of building systems Course overview	Lampson: Hints for computer systems design
2. The Cloud	Cloud applications Datacenters Web vs. cloud vs. cluster	Armbrust et al.:A view of cloud computing
3. Networking basics	Datacenter networks		HW1 online
4. Software-defined networks	SDNs	Feamster et al.: The road to SDN
5/6. Programmable switches + P4	Protocol-independent packet processing	Bosshart et al: P4
7. Load balancing	ECMP, Load-sensitive routing	Katta et al: Hula	HW1 due
8. P4 lab	P4 hands-on exercises		HW2 online
9. Cloud storage	Key value stores Concurrency control DynamoDB
10. Storage at Facebook	Case study: Facebook
11. Concurrency	Consistency models Synchronization Deadlocks	Vogels: Eventually consistent
12. Faults and Failures I	Internet basics Byzantine faults	Tseitlin: The antifragile organization	HW2 due
13. Faults and Failures II	Handling failures Correlated failures	Corbató: On building systems that will fail
14. Diagnosis	Declarative Networking Provenance and Diagnosis	Loo et al.: Declarative networking
15. MapReduce	Programming model Hadoop
16. Cloud services			Quiz 1
17. Peer-to-Peer	P2P networks
18. Security basics	Crypto basics Attacks
19. Denial of service	Smurf sttacks DDoS Botnets	The Mirai botnet
20. Anonymity	DCNet Tor
21. Routing security	BGP Prefix hijacking
22. Differential Privacy	Data privacy Attacks	Dwork et al.:Differential Privacy
23. Accountability	Fault detection Timing fault
24. Bitcoin	Bitcoin Hash chains		Quiz 2