Network and Distributed Systems

Course V313 for MSc,  JMC  & Industrial MSc Students

Syllabus:

The course provides a sound understanding of the principles and concepts involved in designing distributed systems and Internet applications. The objective is to give students a clear overview of the problems and issues that must be dealt with in constructing robust and flexible distributed applications as well as the underlying network protocols needed to support them.

Morris Sloman

• Overview of distributed system architecture: motivation, system structures, ODP Reference model and distribution transparencies 
  
• Interaction primitives: message passing, remote procedure call and Interface definition language, objects and remote object invocation, Java RMI, 
  
• Interaction implementation: message passing, RPC, concurrency and threads
  
• Security: threat analysis, security policies - military (Bell Lapadula) versus commercial models; access control concepts - identification, authentication, authorisation and delegation; authorisation policy: access matrix, access rules and domains; access control lists, capabilities, secret and public key encryption, digital signatures, authentication, Kerberos
  

Duration: 18 lectures, 9 tutorials

Additional Reading:

• Distributed Systems Concepts and Design by G. Coulouris, J. Dollimore and T. Kindberg, Addison Wesley 2005 (4th Ed)  - Main Reference 
• Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, 2nd Editions A.S. Tanenbaum, M. Steen, Prentice Hall, 2006 Main Reference
• Java in Distributed Systems, M. Boger, Wiley 2001
• Network and Distributed Systems Management, M. Sloman (ed.), Addison Wesley 1994
• Cryptography & Network Security , William Stallings, Prentice Hall 2006

Other Web Links:

• Java RMI Tutorial 1
• Java RMI Tutorial 2
• Java Socket Programming Tutorial
• OMG
• LDAP (a subset of X.500)
• Some collections of links to naming
• An unusual description on Kerberos