CY3740: System Security

System Security (CY3740) was- and I anticipate always will remain- the best course I have taken at Northeastern. I strongly believe that every student in Khoury should take it, as no other class will push and engage you as much as this one. Professor Kaan gives students an extremely thorough, rigorous, and technical experience that ensures you fully understand the depth of the course material. All assignments were conducting real exploits against vulnerable systems, and submitting flags to prove victory.

The class was 6pm-9pm with office hours afterwards, and every week I’d stay until midnight working on his challenges. Simply being in the same room as a Professor with so much knowledge and passion was a privilege, and I made sure to take advantage of it.

Some particularly exciting assignments included needing to:

• Write web app exploits for SQL injection, XSS, and CSRF
• Exercise cache attacks and HTTP smuggling
• Execute buffer overflows
• Exploit remote memory corruption vulnerabilities
• Exploit algorithmic complexity attacks and side channels
• Reverse and break unknown executables