Labs

There will be 6 laboratory exercises given throughout the semester related to lecture content.

Lab	Difficulty	Released On	Due On
1. Website Fingerprinting (10%)	Easy	Mon, February 6	Thu, Feb 16
2. Cache Attacks (14%)	Hard	Wed, Feb 15	Thu, March 9
3. Spectre (12%)	Easy	Wed, March 8	Thu, March 23
4. Rowhammer (12%)	Hard	Wed, March 22	Thu, Apr 13
5. ASLR Bypasses (12%)	Easy	Wed, April 12	Thu, Apr 27
6. CPU Fuzzing (12% + 3% Check-off)	Moderate	Wed, April 27	Tue, May 16

In total, your lab grade contributes 75% to your total grade in the course. Each lab is due at 23:59:59.

Lab Check-Offs

Over the course of the term, we will randomly select one of your labs for an in-person check-off (worth 3% of your total course grade). During a check-off you will discuss your submission with the TA, describing your implementation and elaborating on your written answers.

Submission Instructions

Labs will be submitted via GitHub Classroom, and accompanying reports will be submitted via Gradescope.

GitHub

To access and submit lab materials, you will need to have a github.com account. For each lab, we will create a new repository for you on GitHub Classroom. You can checkout each assignment using the invite link posted on Piazza/Canvas.

To push your changes (submitting your work), you should perform the following:

git add FILES_YOU_CHANGED
git commit -m "WHAT YOU CHANGED"
git push

GitHub classroom will snapshot the state of your repository at the due date (at 23:59:59), which we will use to grade your submission. Your repository will not be locked after that point, feel free to continue to push if we have allowed an extension for you.

Gradescope

Each lab contains exercises and discussion questions. Include your answers to these prompts in a PDF file, uploaded to Gradescope (prior to the submission deadline).

New Machine Setup

The labs in this course are run on different machines. For instance, the first lab (Website Fingerprinting) is run on your own machine, and the second lab (Cache Attacks) is run on unicorn.csail.mit.edu. For each machine you use, you must perform the following initial setup:

If working remotely (labs 2-6), connect using ssh (e.g. ssh username@unicorn.csail.mit.edu)
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 (note that if you already have an ssh key, you can skip this)
Press return until the command finishes.
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub (feel free to use an existing key if you have one)
Copy this and create a new ssh key on your GitHub account (instructions if you need help).
git clone <GITHUB CLASSROOM REPOSITORY LINK>

Final Project

Students can choose to do an optional final project in place of labs 4, 5, and 6. The final project will replace the grades for those three labs.