Luke Mains | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Luke Mains HACS408E Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/12/2025	Chase and Luke co-taught HACS408E and the class was a great experience. Probably one of my favorite courses I've taken at UMD so far. The class pacing was good, and classtime was always just a little bit of lecturing followed by two different labs. The labs taught me a lot, and the homework built off of them pretty well. The homeworks were due just every other week, making this class low-stress. Both instructors were very available outside of class for help as well. Luke even held in-person office hours. Chase and Luke emphasized that the class was focused on the learning, and they didn't want grades to be a stressor. You were likely to get most points on assignments if you simply tried. The final was an in-class CTF designed by Chase and Luke where the winning group didn't have to complete the final CTF write-up. It was quite enjoyable for a final. I loved this class, and I learned so much. It covers a lot from malware analysis to binary exploitation to android reversing to firmware reversing, and more.
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.
Luke Mains HACS408E Expecting an A Anonymous 12/14/2024	Great availably on discord, especially during the final project. Also quite good at explaining things and is a cool guy. I recommend! If you put effort into this class (don't use ChatGPT for everything), you'll take away a lot!

Luke Mains
HACS408E

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
12/12/2025

Chase and Luke co-taught HACS408E and the class was a great experience. Probably one of my favorite courses I've taken at UMD so far. The class pacing was good, and classtime was always just a little bit of lecturing followed by two different labs. The labs taught me a lot, and the homework built off of them pretty well. The homeworks were due just every other week, making this class low-stress. Both instructors were very available outside of class for help as well. Luke even held in-person office hours. Chase and Luke emphasized that the class was focused on the learning, and they didn't want grades to be a stressor. You were likely to get most points on assignments if you simply tried. The final was an in-class CTF designed by Chase and Luke where the winning group didn't have to complete the final CTF write-up. It was quite enjoyable for a final. I loved this class, and I learned so much. It covers a lot from malware analysis to binary exploitation to android reversing to firmware reversing, and more.

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.

Luke Mains
HACS408E

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/14/2024

Great availably on discord, especially during the final project. Also quite good at explaining things and is a cool guy. I recommend! If you put effort into this class (don't use ChatGPT for everything), you'll take away a lot!