CS 7929 – Reliability and Security in Computer Architecture

Fall 2014

Course Information

Time and Location	MW 4:30-6pm in CCB 102
Professor	Milos Prvulovic (pronounced Mee-losh Purr-voo-loh-vich) milos at cc dot gatech dot edu
Office Hours	Klaus 3223 Time to be decided during first lecture(in discussion with students)
Textbook	No Required Textbook
Prerequisites	CS 6290 or equivalent. The prerequisite will not be enforced, but students taking CS 7292 without having taken CS 6290 will be expected to catch up with the 6290 material as needed. It is possible to take CS 6290 and CS 7292 concurrently, but some CS 7292 material that relies on knowledge of CS 6290 material will be introduced before the prerequisite material has been taught in CS 6290, and each individual student is responsible for being adequately prepared!
Homework	There will be four homework assignments, to be done individually by each student. Each assignment consists of reading two papers and writing a report. The guidelines for reports and the specific questions to answer and issues to address in a report will be provided as each homework assignment is released.
Exams	One midterm and one final exam. The Midterm will be a take-home exam. The final exam will be a “normal” final exam during the finals week.
Project	One project assignment, to be done in groups of up to two students. Students will form groups and propose project topics - some example topics will be provided by the professor, but students are free to propose other topics. These proposals will be refined in discussion with the professor (mostly to ensure that the proposed project is feasible to do in the time available) until final project assignments are made.
Academic Integrity	All Georgia Tech students are expected to uphold the Georgia Tech Academic Honor Code. You should read it! We take cheating very seriously, that all Georgia Tech faculty (including the instructor for this course) are required to report cases of academic dishonesty to the Dean of Students’ office at Georgia Tech, and that cheating, unauthorized, collaboration, etc.

Final Grade Composition

Project	40%
Midterm Exam	15%
Final Exam	20%
Homework	20% (four homework assignments, equally weighted)
Class Participation	5%  (not competitive, everyone can earn full credit through normal participation in in-class discussions)

Tentative Schedule

Week	Date	Topics	Notes
1	8/18	Introduction, Course Overview, and Reliability Intro
	8/20	Reliability, Fault Models, Classification, and Data
2	8/25	Faults/Errors/Failures, Redundancy, Voting, and Spares
	8/27	Reliability Model of Redundant Systems
3	9/1	Official School Holiday (Labor Day)
	9/3	Redundancy Examples
4	9/8	Error Detection and Correction Codes
	9/10	Parity, Checksums, ECCs and More	Project Group Proposals Due
5	9/15	Examples - RAID and Self-Checking Logic	HW 1 Released
	9/17	Checkpointing and Recovery
6	9/22	Roll-Back and Roll-Forward Recovery
	9/24	Recovery Examples	HW 1 Due
7	9/29	Architectural Vulnerability Analysis	Projects Assigned
	10/1	Lifetime Reliability Concerns	HW2 Assigned
8	10/6	Midterm exam	Midterm Exam
	10/8	Security Intro, Attack Models, Classification, and Data	Oct 10th is "Drop Deadline"
9	10/13	Fall Recess
	10/15	Memory Protections, Protected-Mode, and Virtualization	HW2 Due
10	10/20	Code and Memory Integrity
	10/22	Dataflow Tracking	HW3 Assigned
11	10/27	Hardware-Supported Trusted Computing
	10/29	HW-Supported Trust Examples
12	11/3	Hardware Attacks and XOM	HW3 Due
	11/5	Memory Encryption and Authentication
13	11/10	Covert Channels - Introduction and Cache Example
	11/12	Covert Channels - Cache, Memory, Power	HW4 Assigned
14	11/17	Covert Channels - EM Emanations
	11/19	Denial of Service/QoS Attacks
15	11/24	Lifetime Reduction Attacks	HW4 Due
	11/26	Hardware Trojans, Counterfeits, etc.
16	12/1	Project Demos/Presentations	Project Reports Due
	12/3	Project Demos/Presentations
	12/8	Final exam 2:50am-5:40pm