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Memory Safety, Fuzzing, and Specialized Execution

Competency Contract

  • Primary competency: AR-ARCHITECTURE-001
  • Mastery: explain, apply, develop, and evaluate as required by the semester assessment
  • Status: required evidence extension; it does not add a semester or increase the advertised duration

Required Work

Use sanitizers and fuzzing to reproduce memory failures; compare a bounded C component with a memory-safe Rust design; explain exploit mitigations; measure one SIMD, GPU, or WebAssembly-oriented execution constraint.

Evidence Contract

  • sanitizer trace
  • minimized fuzz case
  • C/Rust safety comparison
  • mitigation note
  • specialized-platform benchmark.

Assessment Integration

  • Project: produce the evidence in the semester repository rather than as detached prose.
  • Checkpoint: show the evidence exists and identify its highest-risk gap.
  • Cumulative review: connect the work to current, previous, and two-semesters-back knowledge.
  • Exam: evaluate a new case and reject an attractive but unsafe or unsupported alternative.
  • Rubric: every required evidence category must pass; strengths cannot average away a missing category.
  • Answer key: calibrate the shape of evidence without prescribing one implementation.

Oral Defense

Explain what the safe-language version prevents, what it does not, and why the measured platform path helps or hurts.

AI-Use Declaration

Record tools and models used, material output accepted, rejected suggestions, and independent verification. Undeclared generated evidence fails the integrity gate.

Reading Route

Start with the linked semester concepts and labs. Use local books selectively for conceptual depth and current official standards for normative requirements. Stop reading when you can produce and defend the required evidence.