Systems, Networking, and Cybersecurity Ph.D. Qualifier Exam

Spring 2014

Examining Faculty

Wenjing Lou (Chair)
Dennis Kafura
Danfeng Yao

Early Withdrawal Policy

Once students have notified the Computer Science Department of their intention to take the Systems and Networking Ph.D. Qualifier Exam, they may withdrawal from taking the exam at any point prior to the public release of the exam questions. Once the exam questions are released, the exam is considered "in progress" and withdrawal is prohibited. Students with questions about this policy should contact the exam chair directly.

Academic Integrity

Discussions among students of the papers identified for the System's Qualifier are reasonable up until the date the exam is released publicly. Once the exam questions are released, we expect all such discussions will cease as students are required to conduct their own work entirely to answer the qualifier questions. This examination is conducted under the University's Graduate Honor System Code . Students are encouraged to draw from other papers than those listed in the exam to the extent that this strengthens their arguments. However, the answers submitted must represent the sole and complete work of the student submitting the answers. Material substantially derived from other works, whether published in print or found on the web, must be explicitly and fully cited. Note that your grade will be more strongly influenced by arguments you make rather than arguments you quote or cite.

Exam Schedule

11/4/2013: this web page created.
12/2/2013: release of reading list
1/20/2014: release of written exam
2/3/2014: at 11:59pm, Student solutions to written exam DUE
2/12/2014: 9:00am-12noon oral exam

Reading List

Fred Cohen, "Computer Viruses, Theory and Experiments," Computers & Security, 1987 (PDF)
Zhenyu Wu, Steven Gianvecchio, Mengjun Xie, and Haining Wang, "Mimimorphism: A New Approach to Binary Code Obfuscation," ACM CCS 2010 (PDF)
Thomas Ristenpart, Eran Tromer, Hovav Shacham, Stefan Savage, "Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud:Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds." ACM CCS 2009 (PDF)
Patrick Traynor, et al, "On Cellular Botnets: Measuring the Impact of Malicious Devices on a Cellular Network Core," ACM CCS 2009 (PDF)
Laurent Eschenauer and Virgil D. Gligor, "A Key-Management Scheme for Distributed Sensor Networks," ACM CCS 2002 (PDF)
Heming Cui, Jiri Simsa, Yi-Hong Lin, Hao Li, Ben Blum, Xinan Xu, Junfeng Yang, Garth A. Gibson, and Randal E. Bryant, "Parrot: a practical runtime for deterministic, stable, and reliable threads." In Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 388-405. DOI=10.1145/2517349.2522735 (PDF)
Tudor David, Rachid Guerraoui, and Vasileios Trigonakis, "Everything you always wanted to know about synchronization but were afraid to ask." In Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 33-48. DOI=10.1145/2517349.2522714 (PDF)

Written Questions

Each year, the Systems & Networking faculty publishes a reading list of papers by the end of the fall semester and a list of integrative research questions to answer within a 10-14 day period. The deadline for students to provide written answers to the research questions is usually within first few weeks of the spring semester. The goal of the written exam is to evaluate the student’s ability to creatively integrate content from the constituent systems research areas.

2014 Exam Questions is here (released on 1/20/2014)

Oral Exam

The written exam will be followed by an oral exam, where the student is expected to defend his/her solutions. Unless specifically requested, the student is not expected to make a formal presentation. In the oral exams, faculty may ask questions about any paper in the reading list to assess the student’s understanding of the subject. Oral exams will be scheduled individually for each student.

Assessment

After the oral examination, the examining faculty will determine the student's score for the examination process. The score is between 0 – 3 points, depending on the student's performance on both the written and oral components. These points may be applied toward the total score of 6 points necessary to qualify for the Ph.D. The assessment criteria, as defined by GPC, are as follows:

3: Excellent performance, beyond that normally expected or required for a PhD student.

2: Performance appropriate for PhD-level work. Prime factors for assessment include being able to distinguish good work from poor work, and explain why; being able to synthesize the body of work into an assessment of the state-of-the-art on a problem (as indicated by the collection of papers); being able to identify open problems and suggest future work.

1: While the student adequately understands the content of the work, the student is deficient in one or more of the factors listed for assessment under score value of 2. A score of 1 is the minimum necessary for an MS-level pass.

0: Student's performance is such that the committee considers the student unable to do PhD-level work in Computer Science.

Registered Students

Mohamed Handosa
Kaixi Hou
M. Safdar Iqbal
Bo Li
Fang Liu
Hyogi Sim