USENIX Courses

The 2020 Election - Remote Voting, Disinformation, and Audit

Expert panel discusses challenges and technologies for safeguarding the 2020 US election amid pandemic concerns, disinformation, and pressure for remote voting, focusing on protecting process legitimacy and integrity.

• YouTube
• 1 hour
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

Digital Contact Tracing - Panel Discussion

Expert panel discusses security, privacy, ethical, and legal issues of digital contact tracing systems for COVID-19, sharing experiences in development and analysis of these technologies.

• YouTube
• 1 hour 4 minutes
• Self-Paced
• Conference Talk

I'm Putting Sloths on the Map

Explore Sloth, a Go tool for simulating network failures in cloud infrastructure. Learn how it helps discover and fix issues in monitoring, graceful degradation, and usability through controlled network disruptions.

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

A Practical Guide to Monitoring and Alerting with Time Series at Scale

Explore time series-based alerting methods and practical examples in Prometheus to reduce alert spam and improve production hygiene for more efficient monitoring at scale.

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

I Can't Believe It's Not Causal! Scalable Causal Consistency with No Slowdown Cascades

Explore Occult, a scalable geo-replicated data store providing causal consistency without slowdown cascades. Learn about its design, implementation, and evaluation using PC-PSI for efficient transaction handling.

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

vCorfu - A Cloud-Scale Object Store on a Shared Log

Explore vCorfu, a cloud-scale object store built on a shared log, offering strong consistency, efficient transactions, and global snapshots while outperforming traditional NoSQL databases.

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

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

TimeCrypt - Encrypted Data Stream Processing at Scale with Cryptographic Access Control

Scalable encrypted time series data processing with customizable access control, enabling secure analytics while preserving data confidentiality in cloud-based IoT and service applications.

• 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