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|  | ==Video==
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|  | The video for the lecture given on November 25, 2015 [http://homeostasis.scs.carleton.ca/~soma/os-2015f/lectures/comp3000-2015f-lec21-25Nov2015.mp4 is now available].
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|  | ==Notes== |  | ==Notes== | 
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|  | <pre>
 |  | * Explain generating, format of patches for reports | 
|  | Lecture 21
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|  | ----------
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|  | no last assignment
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|  | What is research?
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|  |  *Asking questions and figuring out the answers
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|  |  * Questions are much more important than answers
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|  |  * Questions are much *harder* than answers
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|  | What question you ask determines what answer you'll get
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|  | The research literature
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|  |  - many many publications
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|  |  - hard to tell what is any good
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|  | Reseachers know who to trust in their area,and, how in general to determine trust
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|  |  - do spot checks forobvious errors, based on what you do know
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|  |  - do they give full details about what they did? could you reproduce it?
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|  |  - surprising results require extraordinary evidence
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|  | If you're outside the field, look at
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|  |  - publication reputation
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|  |  - citation counts and quality
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|  | to learn more about operating systems research...
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|  | what are the well-respected venues?
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|  | Conferences, not journals
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|  |  USENIX OSDI
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|  |  ACM SOSP
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|  | When should you *really* look at the research literature?
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|  | You're trying to solve a hard problem and aren't sure what approach to take.
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|  |  * look to see what other people have done in response to similar problems!
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|  | What about computer security?
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|  |  * even more publications
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|  | But there's a truth to research...
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|  |  - most of it isn't any good
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|  | Why?
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|  |  - a lot of research doesn't work in practice
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|  |  - a lot of conclusions are premature
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|  | Computer security research is mostly bad
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|  | Cryptography is mostly bad.  And dangerous.
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|  | * easy to implement
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|  | * hard to implement well
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|  | If you make a mistake, your crypto is worse than useless
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|  | * security cannot be specified or completely defined
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|  | * attacks exploit details that you didn't think about
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|  | Timing attacks
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|  | Game in encryption: encrypt and decrypt without disclosing the plaintext or the key
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|  | For many encryption algorithms, execution time is a function of the plaintext and/or key
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|  | Watch how long a computer takes to encrypt something, and you can figure out the key
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|  | 1970's, Data Encryption Standard (DES)
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|  |  - first developed by IBM
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|  |  - "fixed" by the NSA
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|  |    - halved the key (much easier to break)
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|  |    - fiddled with the constants in the algorithm
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|  | Any security technology may improve and reduce your security at the same time
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|  | security is confidentiality, availability, and integrity
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|  | Example: encrypting a hard disk
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|  | Why not use biometrics
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|  |  - fingerprints
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|  |  - facial recognition
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|  | It is all about your threat model
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|  |  - any technology helps with certain risks and harms versus others
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|  |  - what do you care about?
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|  | Tradeoffs are inherent to technology
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|  | </pre>
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