Basic Course Information:

• Instructor: Dean Tullsen
• CSE 3216
• tullsen at cs dot ucsd dot edu
• 534-6181
• office hours: M 4:30-5:30, Th 1-2 (zoom), or by appt
• TA: Hosein Yavarzadeh
• hyavarzadeh at ucsd dot edu
• office hours M 10-11, Tu 8:30-9:30, Th 8:30-9:30
• office hours location, CSE B240A
• Meeting times and place:
• CSE 2154
• lecture: M W 3:00-4:20 p.m.
• Course textbook
This will be mostly a paper reading course, but we will do some readings from the following textbook.
• "Principles of Secure Processor Architecture Design", Jakub Szefer
• This is part of the oustanding Synthesis Lectures series, which can be found here: Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture. Those books will be free to access while you are on the UCSD domain. There are so many great references there (including another security book by Ruby Lee), any number of which would be useful for research in architectural security.
• Let me emphasize that the prerequisite material for this course is a graduate class in computer architecture. Some security background will be useful, but not required.
• Expected activities and deliverables include:
• lab assignments, designed to give you some practical experience with real attacks and defenses.
• assigned reading, typically accompanied by a paper summary that you will turn in.
• Presentations on a particular paper or related papers. It is expected that presentations will be interactive (eg, not like a conference talk).
• A research project, probably done in groups of 2. This will be accompanied by a report due at the end of class.

I. Introduction

II. Brief Review of some Computer Architecture principles

III. Fundamental Security concepts

IV. Side Channel attacks, including contention-based (timing) and others

V. Transient Attacks

VI. Some more general defense approaches

VII. Fundamentally secure architectures

• The grade for 291 will be based on labs, projects, reading summaries, presentations, and participation (includes class, but also online forums). The relative percentages are not yet determined, but expect the project to be a very large factor.
  • I expect we have the highest standards of integrity in a graduate class. However, we will monitor for cheating, including copying off of classmates or from online resources, etc. If cheating is found, of any kind, severe consequences will result.

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