Reviews for HACS408E

Information Review
Chase Kanipe
HACS408E

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
12/15/2024 		I wrote down my experience for this class with Luke, but I will say Chase was a little bit more rigid and hard to talk to during the semester. He wouldn't be as helpful and seemed a bit condescending when answering certain questions. Chase is a very smart individual, but I didn't feel the same rapport that I did with Luke.
Luke Mains
HACS408E

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
12/15/2024 		Luke taught with Chase and this was their first time teaching as graduate students, and I think they did an excellent job. The content was really interesting and every week would mostly be something new from learning assembly, GDB, Ghidra, Wireshark, firmware, reversing Android APKs and Go binaries, etc. Attendance is not mandatory but is recommended to learn how to use the given tools. The labs were really good in terms of reinforcing the material, and the homework was not too hard excluding the ROP chain homework which was somewhat difficult. Luke was extremely helpful in terms of pointing out how to go about things when stuck, and he was very approachable in general during class and was very accessible throughout office hours via Discord. The midterm project was very fair in terms of reverse engineering a binary, but for the final project, they relied on the NSA codebreaker which I don't think they should have done. The difficulty for the third task was much harder than initially anticipated, so at least they were receptive to feedback and modified the final project to something more achievable. Overall, it's not too hard of a class in general and you learn a lot. As a side note, I had a terrible experience using the Kali VM through the ACES portal. I'd recommend getting an x86-64 computer and running your own Kali or Ubuntu.