Course Schedule, Reading List, and Slides
Fall 2026
L Lecture given by the instructor D Paper discussion led by student presenters
Week 1: Bootstrap
Aug 24Mon
L Course Logistics
Readings: Please fill this anonymous course-preparation survey after the first class and before Aug 28 (Fri). You need to sign into your UTMail account.
Materials: Slides
Week 2: Microarchitectural Side Channels
Aug 31Mon
L Cache-Based Side Channels (w/ Demo!)
Pre-lecture: Please watch this conference presentation Link
Post-lecture: Choose one to review:
Sep 2Wed
L Side Channels in Public Clouds (w/ Demo!)
Pre-lecture: Please read this short article on serverless computing Link
Optional:
- Hey, you, get off of my cloud: exploring information leakage in third-party compute clouds (CCS '09) Link
- Everywhere All at Once: Co-Location Attacks on Public Cloud FaaS (ASPLOS '24) Link
Materials: Slides
Week 3: Transient Execution Attacks
Sep 9Wed
L Spectre and Meltdown (w/ Demo!)
Pre-lecture: Conference presentation of Spectre Attacks Link
Post-lecture: Choose one to review:
Week 4: Side-Channel Defenses
Sep 14Mon
L Data-Oblivious Computation
Pre-lecture: Guidelines for Mitigating Timing Side Channels Against Cryptographic Implementations by Intel Link
Optional:
Materials:
Sep 16Wed
L Spectre Defenses
Pre-lecture: How Linux patches Spectre v1 gadgets (please read Links 1–3 in order) Link 1, Link 2, Link 3
Post-lecture: Choose one to review:
- Efficient Invisible Speculative Execution through Selective Delay and Value Prediction (ISCA '19) Link
- Speculative Taint Tracking (STT): A Comprehensive Protection for Speculatively Accessed Data (MICRO '19) Link
Materials: TBA