A brief summary of CS-725#

CS-725: Topics in Language-based Software Security, co-taught by Mathias Payer and Manuel Egele, is an inspiring seminar on software testing (finding bugs), and mitigation (protecting against the exploitation of bugs).

What we did during the seminar: give presentation, ask questions, and give feedbacks.

What I learned from the seminar: experiences, conclusion for research, techniques, and implementation.

  • What are the difference between sanitizers and mitigation?
  • How to estimate the overhead?
  • Is the evaluation fair and enough?
  • Why it this a survey paper rather than an SoK?
  • ...

What I felt about the seminar: 1) both teachers and students are dedicated; 2) the whole class is self-organized, 3) I didn't spend much time on it but learned something.

I attended a similar seminar on system (not system security) in Zhejiang University. Here are some differences.

  • This system seminar does not actually match my research interests. Only the last lesson was about system security. Most of the time, I did not listen or just skipped lessons. I chose this seminar because I needed two more credits and there was no more security-focused seminars at all. It's better to cut down the credit requirement or join a seminar hosted by our supervisors who have free time.

  • The teaching material in this system seminar were the latest papers accepted by OSDI and SOSP, which might not be the best choices because we know nothing about the related work. We may need famous and cited papers like in CS-725.

  • It's the instructor that introduced papers in class not students. Considering not all students were interested in this seminar, this might be a better choice.

  • We don't know why. Why this? Why that? In the final examination, we were required to find the authors' claims in the paper and fill them into the blanks.

  • We have to spend two 45-minutes sessions for this system seminar and we have to spend extra time to prepare the examination. For CS-725, we speed one 45-minute session for class, and one session for preparing slides and writing summary. For CS-725, the whole time spent on the seminar won't exceed the requirement of two credits. Chinese Universities really should learn this!!!