Information Security Lab: System and Network Defenses

Course Website

Average Workload

17.0 hrs/wk

Average Difficulty

3.8 /5

Average Overall

3.2 /5
CS-6264
Information Security Lab: System and Network Defenses
Taken Summer 2023
Reviewed on 8/7/2023
Workload: 15 hr/wk
Difficulty: Medium
Overall: Neutral

The projects follow what other reviews have said so I won't go over them. This class still feels like a beta test which is kind of frustrating. On the web exploit project the server was down for several days because nobody realized the server that was hosting it got repurposed. On a similar note the final AI project was totally un-usable and the server required frequent reboots so it was difficult for students to make progress since we were essentially working around the times TA's were available to clean things up.

If you've taken IIS or Network Security you should know what to expect with a Wenke Lee class. The instructor is totally absent and all of the readings in the course were published in part by him. All of the lectures are the same micro-lecture format as the aforementioned classes and some of the videos were directly from IIS or Net Sec so don't expect to learn anything new from the lectures.

The final exam is pretty straight forward multiple choice based on quizzes/lectures/projects. I didn't study for it and got ~70% which was fine because of the extra credit could make up the difference.

Considering the issues, the grading was fair. 5% extra credit for leaving reviews for the projects. I don't think this will be the standard but they dropped our lowest project score because of all of the issues we had with the AI project. The TA's have mentioned there will be a curve but the syllabus says grades are a straight A=90, B=80, C=<70. I don't have a ton of programming experience but after everything I ended up with a ~95%.

All in all, its a good alternative to 6265 if you don't have 35 hours a week to put into the course but it won't be as fulfilling.