CS590-SYS Systems Security Seminar

Mathias Payer -- Spring semester 2018, seminar.

Seminar overview

In this informal seminar we discuss current interesting system security papers from top conferences. Systems security research is an interesting and diverse area that has a variety of sub fields. When discussing the individual publications we look at the proposed policies, the mechanisms, prototype implementations and their evaluation. We discuss research contributions, compare the publication to relocated work but also mention possible shortcomings, pitfalls, and applications to other areas or architectures.

This seminar is intended for people that are broadly interested in systems security research, novel systems security trends, or clever applications of systems security ideas. We discuss one paper each week and try to learn new things about systems security research together.

Topics: systems, security, programming languages, software engineering.

Discussed papers

Suggested papers

The following papers are suggestions and can be presented during one of the seminars:

Seminar format

For the seminar we will focus on top systems security topics from conferences like IEEE Security and Privacy (Oakland), Usenix Security, NDSS, CCS, PLDI, OSDI, SOSP, Usenix ATC, or EuroSys. Top papers from other conferences are welcome as well as long as there is sufficient interest.

The seminar is student run, i.e., a student will present a paper each week. The general idea is that everybody reads the paper and one person (the one who selected the paper) is discussion lead. The discussion lead gives a 10-15 minute introduction into the paper and highlights the important research contributions. After this introduction we'll focus on an open discussion of the advantages of the paper, possible disadvantages, evaluation, scope, alternatives, and other constraints.

It is expected that students lead at least one discussion per semester. If you intend to take this course for credit you must present at least one paper. If you have a paper in mind, please sign up with Mathias to agree on a date and paper. The general mailing list for the seminar is at https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/syssem and can be reached using syssem@lists.purdue.edu. If you are interested in the seminar then please sign up on the mailing list as all announcements and reminders will go out to that list.

Discussion leads are expected to synchronize the topic with Mathias and are then responsible to send out announcement emails and reminders to the seminar email list.

Previous semesters

Fall 2017

Spring 2017

Fall 2016

Spring 2016

Fall 2015

Spring 2015