Operating Systems and Security

There will an early opportunity for exam review on 1.8. (Thursday of this week) from 12:30 to 13 o'clock in room APB 3105. It is strictly limited to those students who cannot retake the exam again (third attempt) and should allow to resolve any potential issues with the grading before the results are forwarded to the examination offices.
A regular exam review, open to all students, will be offered at the beginning of the new semester.

We're currently conducting a survey to get some feedback on the lecture in general and its exam in particular. Participation is voluntary but we would appreciate a large turnout. The questions are in German but answering in English is also fine.

Topics

The lecture introduces the fundamentals of systems architecture. Students will 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 techniques 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
Security
Memory
Quantitative Methods
Client-Server-Architectures and Process-Communication in Distributed Systems
Security in Distributed Systems
File Systems
Distributed File Systems
Fault-Tolerance
Device Drivers

Slides (in German only)

Introduction:
Threads
Deadlocks
Quantitative Methods
Memory
Security Mechanisms
Security:
File Systems
- Introduction
- Robust File Systems
Distributed Systems
- Client/Server Architectures
- Distributed File Systems
Fault Tolerance
Hardware and Device Drivers

Exercises

Tasks (in German only)

Unix — as PDF
Threads — as PDF
- Deadlocks — as PDF
- The Deadlock Empire
Quantitative Methods — as PDF
- Memory Management — as PDF
- Web-app demonstrating virtual to physical address translation
Security — as PDF
- Cryptography — as PDF
- Der Dialog der Schwestern
File Systems — as PDF

Exam Preparation (in German only)

The exam takes place each semester and students are encouraged to use the mailing list accompanying the lecture for discussions and questions.

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

TUD