Really enjoyable class. I've never done CTF-style problems before, and this course covers a LOT of many different vectors for attacks. I have never worked with C, Assembly, or machine learning in Python before, so I had to learn quickly, but it never felt truly overwhelming.

I gotta agree with the other review here, Machine Learning being only one week seems like a mistake. It took me more time than any other assignment, mostly on the sheer amount of coding, and also the somewhat subjective parts of the assignment (can't go into specifics). That particular projects workload felt overly much, especially compared to Cryptography, for which we were given two weeks, but I was able to complete in 3-4 days. Some assignments were tough, but the EdStem discussion board provided a ton of great guidance.

All that said, if you are the type of person that loves puzzles, cracking codes, and learning about new, complex systems, I highly recommend this course. This is a course for folks who love complex board games, video games like Portal or Baba is You, and are extremely curious and can think laterally.

I just finished my 8th project in IIS, which was my final project. There were 9 projects this semester but if you get 100% on the first 8 projects, the 9th does not matter because you have an A in the class, even without a submission attempt for project 9. I took this class because I am working on a CS master's but I also plan on pursuing Georgia Tech's MS in Cybersecurity and this class satisfies a requirement for both programs. I felt that 9 projects, of the scope of these projects, in one semester was unreasonable. I loved every project in this course but there were too many of them. The machine learning project was 1 week long, which felt insane. The TAs are excellent, the projects are fun and interesting but they just crammed too much content into one course. I strongly recommend taking this course by itself. No individual task is too difficult but this class is an avalanche of projects.