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

Spring 2018

Examining Faculty

    Dr. Godmar Back (Chair)
    Dr. Ali Butt
    Dr. Gang Wang

Registered Students

Send email to gback@vt.edu to be registered. Your participation in the survey did not register you, I need to hear from you!

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

    11/17/2017: this web page created.
    12/4/2017: release of reading list
    1/8/2018: release of written exam
    1/22/2018 (11:59PM): student solutions to written exam due
    end of Jan/beg of Feb: oral exams.

Reading List

  1. Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks, Nicholas Carlini and David Wagner, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2017 (IEEE SP'17).
  2. Detecting Credential Spearphishing in Enterprise Settings, Grant Ho, Aashish Sharma, Mobin Javed, Vern Paxson, David Wagner, USENIX Security Symposium, 2017 (USENIX SEC'17).
  3. Online Tracking: A 1-million-site Measurement and Analysis, Steven Englehardt, Arvind Narayanan, ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2016 (CCS'16).
  4. Automatically Detecting Vulnerable Websites Before They Turn Malicious, Kyle Soska and Nicolas Christin, USENIX Security Symposium, 2014 (USENIX SEC'14).
  5. The Design, Implementation, and Deployment of a System to Transparently Compress Hundreds of Petabytes of Image Files for a File-Storage Service , Daniel Reiter Horn, Ken Elkabany, and Chris Lesniewski-Lass, Keith Winstein,, 14th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (USENIX NSDI'17).
  6. NetCache: Balancing Key-Value Stores with Fast In-Network Caching , Xin Jin, Xiaozhou Li, Haoyu Zhang, Robert Soule, Jeongkeun Lee, Nate Foster, Changhoon Kim, and Ion Stoica, Proceedings of the 26th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '17).
  7. EC-Cache: Load-Balanced, Low-Latency Cluster Caching with Online Erasure Coding , K. V. Rashmi, Mosharaf Chowdhury, Jack Kosaian, Ion Stoica and Kannan Ramchandran, 12th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (USENIX OSDI'16).
  8. Exploiting Spot and Burstable Instances for Improving the Cost-efficacy of In-Memory Caches on the Public Cloud , Cheng Wang, Bhuvan Urgaonkar, Aayush Gupta, George Kesidis, and Qianlin Liang, Proceedings of the Twelfth European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys '17).
  9. NICE: Network-Integrated Cluster-Efficient Storage , Samer Al-Kiswany, Suli Yang, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, Proceedings of HPDC '17.
  10. Light-Weight Contexts: An OS Abstraction for Safety and Performance , James Litton, Anjo Vahldiek-Oberwagner, Eslam Elnikety, and Deepak Garg Bobby Bhattacharjee, Peter Druschel, 12th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (USENIX OSDI'16).
  11. EbbRT: A Framework for Building Per-Application Library Operating Systems, Dan Schatzberg, James Cadden, Han Dong, Orran Krieger, and Jonathan Appavoo, 12th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (USENIX OSDI'16).
  12. My VM is Lighter (and Safer) Than Your Container, Filipe Manco et al, Proceedings of the 26th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '17).
  13. TensorFlow: A System for Large-Scale Machine Learning , Martín Abadi et al, 12th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (USENIX OSDI'16).

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.

(will be released on: January 8, 2018)

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:

Past Exams 

    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