COMPUTER SCIENCES DEPARTMENT UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON CS 736 Fall 1988 Bart Miller Project List Brief Description Due Wednesday October 26 Midway Interview Friday November 18 Final Report Due Thursday December 15 General Comments The projects are intended to give you an opportunity to study a particular area related to operating systems Your project may require a test implementation measurement study simulation literature search paper design or some combination of these The project suggestions below are briefly stated They are intended to guide you into particular areas and you are expected to expand these suggestions into a full project descriptions This gives you more freedom in selecting an area and more burden in defining your own project There may be more issues listed for a project than you can cover If you have a topic of your own that is not listed below you should come and talk with me so we can work out a reasonable project description You will write a paper that reports on your project This paper will structured as if you were going to submit it to a conference I will provide more details on the project report later in the semester You can work in teams of two people on the project and report Projects 1 Operating System Utility Program Reliability The Fuzz Generator The goal of this project is to evaluate the robustness of various UNIX utility programs given an unpredictable input stream This project has two parts First you will build a fuzz generator This is a program that will output a random character stream Second you will take the fuzz generator and use it to attack as many UNIX utilities as possible with the goal of trying to break them For the utilities that break you will try to determine what type of input cause the break The fuzz generator will generate an output stream of random characters It will need several options to give you flexibility to test different programs Below is the start for a list of options for features that fuzz will support It is important when writing this program to use good C and UNIX style and good structure as we hope to distribute this program to others p only the printable ASCII characters a all ASCII characters 0 include the null 0 byte character l generate random length lines n terminated strings f name record characters in file name d nnn delay nnn seconds following each character r name replay characters in file name to output The fuzz program should be used to test various UNIX utilities These utilities include programs like vi mail cc make sed awk sort etc The goal is to first see if the program will break and second to understand what type of input is responsible for the break 2 Security in a Workstation CPU Server The Condor system allows users to automatically run their programs on any of a collection of idle workstations It automatically chooses an idle workstation checkpoints the program and can move the program to another workstation when the owner returns This system was developed in our Computer Sciences Department While Condor is an effective system for load distribution and providing free cycles to the user community it has only briefly addressed security issues If you own a workstation you would like to be confident that the guest programs that are running cannot access or damage your resources processes files devices etc The goal of this project is to study the existing Condor features evaluate the UNIX security facilities and then design and implement security modifications to Condor 3 Visual Shell Personal computers like the Mac are easy to use because of their simple and visual user interfaces The goal of this project is to build a visual shell for UNIX This shell uses graphic display and mouse input to list files delete files start programs build pipes redirect input and output etc Keyboard input will also be need to be smoothly integrated in the design This shell should also allow for more advanced features such as non linear pipes editing of commands and program output and feeding this back into programs visual aliases etc 4 A Language for Distributed Games DREGS is a system for helping design and build distributed multi player games DREGS runs on our local uVax Bobcat and IBM RT PC workstations This project involves the interaction of distributed systems and programming languages The DREGS design includes a language call GDL game description language that simplifies the programming of the games Currently games are hand coded according to a GDL like coding style The goal of this project would be to build a simple GDL compiler There are several games that currently run under DREGS and part of this project would be to convert at least one of these to directly use GDL This project is especially suited to a person with a strong interest in compilers An alternative version of this project would be to investigate the use of an object oriented programming language probably C to support a set of standard classes to support GDL You would then go on to implement these classes and test them by converting one of the simpler games The current DREGS system is described in two papers I can supply copies of these A Bricker M Clark T Lebeck B P Miller and P Wu Experience with DREGS Proc of the 1987 Summer USENIX Conf Phoenix June 1987 A Bricker T Lebeck and B P Miller DREGS A Distributed Runtime Environment for Game Support Proc of the EUUG 1986 Conf Manchester England September 1986 5 A Resource Scheduler for a Distributed Environment The Computer Sciences Dept has a resource scheduling problem that of scheduling conference rooms This problem has several interesting characteristics First the service must be accessible from throughout the campus network but not from outside the campus or department Second we need some level of protection If one person makes a reservation then another person should not be able to delete it Third data consistency must be preserved This means that if two people are making reservations you must serialize requests and avoid race conditions Fourth you will need a decent user interface The users should be able to gracefully examine the schedule and make reservations A graphic interface using X windows would be best 6 Distributed Simulation Algorithm Chandy has developed a simulation algorithm that is supposed to provide good parallel execution in a distributed environment The goal of this project is to take the description of Chandy s algorithm build an implementation of a simulation and