Benches
The twelve-week teaching schedule: what happens in each bench, what to prepare, and what leaves the room.
A Bench is where the lecture's channel gets handled: a trace to read, a threat model to sketch, a function to rewrite. Bring what the previous week produced — most weeks build directly on the last one's output.
Noticing a leak
The first Bench — treating a machine as something that emits, not just something that computes
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Listening for keys
Recording a keyboard, and finding out how much of what was typed survives in the sound alone
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Tracing by hand
Reading a captured power trace against the code that produced it, one operation at a time
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Timing a comparison
Measuring how long a string comparison takes, and watching the measurement get more honest as the sample size grows
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Shielding a room
Pricing out what it would take to stop a monitor's electromagnetic emissions from leaving the room they are generated in
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Mapping a shared cache
Timing memory accesses to work out, without any special privilege, which cache lines a second process touched
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Measuring a reflection
Recovering readable text from a photograph of light bounced off something that was never meant to be a display
Week 7 · 5 April 2027
Timing a decay
Measuring how fast a keypad forgets what was pressed on it, and finding the two different moments at which recovery stops working
Week 8 · 12 April 2027
Sharing a tenant
Working out, from the outside, whether two processes are colocated on the same physical machine
Week 9 · 19 April 2027
Scoring a leak
Attaching a number to how much a channel reveals, then using the numbers to build two rankings that disagree
Week 10 · 26 April 2027
Rewriting for constant time
Taking a function that leaks through its running time and rewriting it so the leak is gone, not just smaller
Week 11 · 3 May 2027
Defending a design
A dry run of the capstone review, done as peer critique before it counts
Week 12 · 10 May 2027