USENIX Courses

Encoding, Fast and Slow - Low-Latency Video Processing Using Thousands of Tiny Threads

Innovative video processing system using cloud functions and parallel computing for low-latency editing and encoding of high-resolution videos, including 4K and VR content.

• YouTube
• 23 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Cloning Credit Cards - A Combined Pre-play and Downgrade Attack on EMV Contactless

Reveals a novel attack on EMV contactless payment cards, allowing creation of functional clones with pre-played authorization codes for unauthorized transactions at any EMV contactless terminal.

• YouTube
• 27 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Burnout and Ops

Strategies for preventing and recovering from burnout in infrastructure engineering, with insights on setting boundaries, improving work conditions, and maintaining long-term career sustainability.

• YouTube
• 41 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Reliability When Everything Is a Platform - Why You Need to SRE Your Customers

Explore the concept of SREs taking joint operational responsibility for customer-built systems on platforms, addressing challenges and discussing future implications for SRE as a discipline.

• YouTube
• 49 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Steal This Movie - Automatically Bypassing DRM Protection in Streaming Media

Explores a memory-based approach to bypass DRM protection in popular streaming services, demonstrating vulnerabilities in Amazon, Hulu, Spotify, and Netflix's content protection systems.

• YouTube
• 28 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Learning in Situ - A Randomized Experiment in Video Streaming

Randomized trial of video-streaming algorithms reveals challenges for sophisticated schemes in real-world settings. New algorithm developed using in situ learning outperforms others.

• YouTube
• 21 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Gryff - Unifying Consensus and Shared Registers

Unifying consensus and shared registers for geo-replicated storage with linearizability and low tail latency. Introduces carstamps for efficient ordering of reads and writes in distributed systems.

• YouTube
• 20 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

High Throughput Cryptocurrency Routing in Payment Channel Networks

Innovative routing solution for payment channel networks, introducing "Spider" to packetize transactions and use multi-path transport, enhancing throughput and efficiency in cryptocurrency payments.

• YouTube
• 21 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

NetTLP - A Development Platform for PCIe Devices in Software Interacting with Hardware

Explore NetTLP, a platform for developing PCIe devices that enables software-hardware interaction. Learn about its potential impact on datacenter networks and low-latency, high-bandwidth packet delivery.

• YouTube
• 20 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

SP-PIFO - Approximating Push-In First-Out Behaviors Using Strict-Priority Queues

Innovative packet scheduling technique using strict-priority queues to approximate PIFO behavior, enabling programmable scheduling at line rate and scale on existing hardware.

• YouTube
• 23 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

TCP ≈ RDMA - CPU Efficient Remote Storage Access with i10

Innovative remote storage stack i10 achieves RDMA-like performance on commodity hardware, saturating 100Gbps links with low CPU usage while allowing unmodified applications to use the kernel's TCP/IP stack.

• YouTube
• 21 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

ABC - A Simple Explicit Congestion Controller for Wireless Networks

Innovative congestion control protocol for wireless networks, offering improved throughput and lower delays compared to existing solutions. Easily deployable without changes to headers or devices.

• YouTube
• 22 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

FPGA-Accelerated Compactions for LSM Based Key-Value Store

Explore FPGA acceleration for LSM-tree key-value stores, improving compaction speed and system throughput while reducing CPU bottlenecks and enhancing energy efficiency in short KV storage scenarios.

• YouTube
• 27 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

InfiniCache - Exploiting Ephemeral Serverless Functions to Build a Cost-Effective Memory Cache

Innovative serverless-based object caching system offering cost savings, high data availability, and competitive performance for storage-intensive web applications.

• YouTube
• 31 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

How to Copy Files

Explores efficient file cloning techniques in BetrFS, introducing "nimble clones" that optimize performance and space usage through copy-on-abundant-write policy and write-optimized key-value store.

• YouTube
• 30 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk