CS 4630

Prof. Reiss is brilliant--I wouldn't be surprised if he knows the Intel 64 manual by heart. But more importantly, he's among the least condescending professors in the CS department. Like, I've asked some truly dense questions and never once has he made me feel stupid. His lectures are detailed (I compared notes with someone who took DADA with another prof and they're worlds apart), to the point where it's like drinking from a fire hose. But he periodically has polls and explains his thinking on the answers really thoroughly. Somehow my 30-second-attention-span brain never thinks to check the time until an hour into class, which seems like a compliment that he manages to keep things engaging. Anyway, super recommend him.

This was a great class. Not super easy by any metric but I definitely learned a lot. I would recommend taking it with Reiss if you can because he really knows what he's talking about and he will explain things in lots of detail. He's also super active on Piazza, there was one time where I was running into an error an hour before an assignment was due and he was able to belp me out on Piazza. The lectures could get really hard to follow (a lot discussion of very fine details of assembly, which is just the reality of trying to make code do something its not supposed to do), but every once in a while Reiss would do an example question and walk us through the answer which really helped. The homeworks were also a ton of fun and generally not too difficult. Each one felt like a little puzzle to solve :)

CourseForum may be bugged but I had Davidson teach this class. Overall I thought the course was pretty simple and not hard at all. There's 8 total assignments, 2 exams, and the final OWL. Firstly Davidson actually gets into the roleplay of the class since I think it was him who actually pitched the name way back when. He's a pretty chill dude and he goes off a lot of tangents and loves to tell stories. I'm not like one of these tryhards that's like 'I wanted to learn more grrrr,' but I can completely understand where they're coming from. I really like cybersecurity so I just enjoy the course teachings, but I think objectively he didn't teach concepts well. The OWL was similar to intro to cyber CTF, but instead of CTF it was hack/break/alter an exe file. One thing that made a lot of people mess up is that for all the assignments you will be using a Jammy VM which is like Ubuntu 22.04, but Davidson hasn't changed the final since 2022 so you have to go make a new VM on Bionic which is Ubuntu 18.something before you start the OWL or else it is literally impossible for one of the challenges--which he basically never told us btw. But overall I thought the class was overall chill, a lot of reverse engineering which kinda sucks if you don't like reading x86 or assembly, but you learn quickly in cyber that everything all falls back to C and then breaking down the C code so its only inevitable. I recommend the course it wasn't too stressful and if you like Cyber then you'll like this