Operating Systems and Security

The exam takes place on Monday, 27th February 2012 in the central lecture rooms (HSZ), starting at 7.30 AM. Your student card and an identity card with a photograph must be presented. Foreign students show their passport. A hand-written (on both sides) A4-sized sheet and a "conventional" calculator is admitted (no communications or text storage capabilities).

Topics

The lecture introduces the fundamentals of systems architecture. Students learn the key building blocks and construction principles for local systems first and for distributed systems later on. A primary concern for us is to highlight references to neighboring topics. Examples are discussing the interaction of certain hardware characteristics with system building blocks, the introduction to the basics of cryptographic techiques and the application of mathematical methods to ascertain quantitative properties of systems. We also focus on some principles for constructing fault-tolerant and secure systems already in this basic course. A third concern is to get students acquainted with techniques for low-level machine-oriented programming at the latest in this lecture.

Breakdown of the lecture:

Introduction
Key Building Blocks
UNIX
Processes and Threads
Deadlocks
Memory
File Systems and Fault-Tolerance
Quantitative Methods
Security
Client-Server-Architektures and Process-Communication in Distributed Systems
Distributed File Systems
Security in Distributed Systems

Slides (in German only)

Cryptography:
- AES
- RSA
Unix:
Security
Threads:
Memory:
- Virtual Memory
- Page Replacement and Memory Regions
File Systems Introduction
Distributed Systems
Signatures and Certificates
Quantitative Methods
Security:
File Systems:
Security:
- Buffer Overflows

Exercises (in German only)

Exam Preparation

The numbering at the end of each question designates the year and month of the original use of the qeustion in an exam.

TUD