CS261 Fall 2014: Quiz #3

Approaches to Security

You are a first year graduate student and your advisor says that s/he thinks there is a great thesis to be had by combining the "Towards Optimization-Safe Systems: Analyzing the Impact of Undefined Behavior" work of Wang et. al. with the "Enforcing Forward-Edge Control-Flow Integrity in GCC and LLVM" work of Tice et. al. with the "Making information flow explicit in Histar" work of Zeldovich et. al.

You should either:

• Explain why this suggestion makes you immediately change advisors (and answers of the form, "I'm not interested in X" are not acceptable).
• Propose a project that does what your advisor suggests. Explain why the project is potentially interesting and thesis-worthy.

Synchronization and Scalability

You have been hired as the CTO of Fastdata.com. The first thing you need to do is analyze existing data management solutions for their ability to scale. Outline your plan for conducting this analysis, citing relevant papers from this course where appropriate.

Your hints for System Design?

Explain one of the following things:

• How you learned one of Lampson's hints in your own work -- either in reading papers this semester, in working on your final project, or in other work.
• A hint that is not in Lampson's paper, but that you believe is in the same spirit as those in the paper. Explain the hint and where/how you came up with it.

Survey #3