Systems, Networking, and Cybersecurity
Ph.D. Qualifier Exam
Spring 2022
Examining Faculty
Dr. Bo Ji (Chair)
Dr. Xun (Steve) Jian
Dr. Taejoong (Tijay) Chung
Registered Students
Send an email to Dr. Bo Ji (boji@vt.edu) to be registered. Your participation in the survey did not register you.
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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 withdraw 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
11/11/2021: this web page created.
12/01/2021: release of reading list
12/06/2021: deadline for students to commit to exams
01/06/2022: release of written exam
01/20/2022 (11:59PM): student solutions to written exam due
End of Jan/Beginning of Feb: oral exams
Reading List
-
Is the Web Ready for OCSP Must-Staple?,
Taejoong Chung, Jay Lok, Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, David Choffnes, Dave Levin, Bruce M. Maggs, Alan Mislove, John Rula, Nick Sullivan and Christo Wilson,
ACM IMC, 2018.
-
A Longitudinal, End-to-End View of the DNSSEC Ecosystem,
Taejoong Chung, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, David Choffnes, Dave Levin, Bruce M. Maggs, Alan Mislove and Christo Wilson,
USENIX Security, 2017.
-
NXNSAttack: Recursive DNS Inefficiencies and Vulnerabilities,
Yehuda Afek, Anat Bremler-Barr and Herzliya Lior Shafir,
USENIX Security, 2020.
-
Quantifying Memory Underutilization in HPC Systems and Using it to Improve Performance via Architecture Support,
Gagandeep Panwar, Da Zhang, Yihan Pang, Mai Dahshan, Nathan DeBardeleben, Binoy Ravindran and Xun Jian,
ACM MICRO, 2019.
-
Forget Failure: Exploiting SRAM Data Remanence for Low-overhead Intermittent Computation,
Harrison Williams, Xun Jian and Matthew Hicks,
ACM ASPLOS, 2020.
-
Quantifying Server Memory Frequency Margin and Using It to Improve Performance in HPC Systems,
Da Zhang, Gagandeep Panwar, Jagadish B. Kotra, Nathan DeBardeleben, Sean Blanchard and Xun Jian,
IEEE ISCA, 2021.
-
ATP: In-network Aggregation for Multi-tenant Learning,
ChonLam Lao, Yanfang Le, Kshiteej Mahajan, Yixi Chen, Wenfei Wu, Aditya Akella and Michael Swift,
USENIX NSDI, 2021.
-
New Directions in Automated Traffic Analysis,
Jordan Holland, Paul Schmitt, Nick Feamster and Prateek Mittal,
ACM CCS, 2021.
-
Exploring LoRa for Long-range Through-wall Sensing,
Fusang Zhang, Zhaoxin Chang, Kai Niu, Jie Xiong, Beihong Jin, Qin Lv and Daqing Zhang,
ACM IMWUT/UbiComp, 2020.
Written Questions
Each year, the Systems, Networking, and Cybersecurity 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.
2022 Exam Questions
(released on: January 6, 2022)
Please email your solutions document (in PDF format) to Dr. Bo Ji (boji@vt.edu) by January 20, 2022, 11:59PM EST.
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.
Past Exams
Spring 2021 exam
Spring 2020 exam
Spring 2019 exam
Spring 2017 exam
Spring 2016 exam
Spring 2015 exam
Spring 2014 exam
Spring
2013 exam
Spring 2012
exam
Spring 2011
exam
Spring 2010 exam
Spring 2009
exam
Spring 2008
exam
Spring
2007 exam
Spring
2006 exam