CSE 365 "Information Assurance" Fall 2026

Course Info

Course Numbers: CSE 365 (89237)
Meeting Times: Monday & Wednesday, 1:30pm--2:45pm (BYENG209)
Course Discord: TBA

Instructors

Instructor: Robert Wasinger
Discord Handle: robwaz
Email: rwasinger@asu.edu

TAs

Name: Pratham Gupta
Discord Handle: alchemy1729

Name: Max Trapido
Discord Handle: m.a.xxx (aka Computer Max)

Course Description

This course is an introduction to the field of information security, with a focus on practical skills and hands-on experience. Students will learn about the principles of secure system design, common vulnerabilities, and techniques for defending against attacks.

Recommended Textbook

There is no recommended textbook for this course. Any reading material assigned will be from publicly-available sources on the internet.

Prerequisites

This course will be challenging, and students are expected to learn some of the necessary technologies on their own time. This course uses low-level computer architecture (for example, students will learn x86 assembly) and low-level programming languages (specifically, C), as well as a high-level programming language (specifically, Python).

Schedule

The listing below is the tentative module progression of the course. Modules run approximately two weeks, covering four class lectures. The first three classes will explore the topic under study. The last class of each module will be reserved for a Pinnacle Challenge (see Module Scoring below): a harder challenge solved together in class for credit.

Module 1: Linux Fundamentals

Module 2: Assembly & Debugging

Module 3: Reverse Engineering

Module 4: Binary Exploitation

Module 5: Network Security

Module 6: Web Security

Module 7: Cryptography

Course Communication

All announcements and communications for the class will take place on the discord, with announcements in the #announcements and discussion in the #text class-specific channel. Students are required to be on this discord.

Student may use the discord to ask questions or seek clarifications, and the TA, Instructor, or other students can answer. Note that sharing full solution scripts or answers is expressly prohibited, but otherwise, collaboration on the way to the solution is allowed.

Questions may be directly sent to the instructor.

Before directly messaging your question, please consider asking it in the course channel instead. This way, the entire class will benefit from your question.

Office Hours

Office hours will be held weekly. All students are encouraged to attend office hours for in-person assistance.

Assignments

Student performance will be evaluated on 7 equally weighted homework assignments, one per content module. Each assignment will consist of between 10 and 100 problems.

Assessment

Challenge-based assignments

Many assignments will consist of a large amount of varied, but related challenges, and will be live for two weeks. Solving these challenges may require the use or implementation of fairly complex hacking tools. Solving each individual challenge will grant a challenge-specific passcode, called a "flag". The maximum number of flags possible to score for an assignment is equal to the maximum number of challenges in the assignment.

The existence of flags means that there is no wrong way to solve a challenge. If you tricked the challenge into giving you the valid flag, good job.

Note: All assignments may not follow this format.

Module Scoring

Module assignment scoring is earned by solving challenges: your solves / total number of challenges. All challenges can be solved after the assignment deadline for half credit.

Pinnacle Challenges

On the last class day of each module, a single Pinnacle Challenge is released at the start of class and is due by the end of the day. This challenge is deliberately harder than the challenges in that module's homework, it is the module's capstone. You may solve it alone, together as a class, or work it on your own. Either way, the goal is to apply everything the module built toward one tougher problem. Grading is all-or-nothing: solving the Pinnacle Challenge earns full credit for that module's share of the 14% (there are 7 content modules, so each is worth 2% of your final grade).

Exams

There will be two in-class, handwritten exams this semester. These exams are designed to assess your conceptual understanding of the mechanisms underlying the concepts studied throughout the course. Exams will be closed-book, and no laptops, tablets, or other electronic devices will be permitted. However, you may bring one cheat sheet: a single 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper with handwritten notes on both sides.

Students must attend class on the day of an exam. Exam dates will be announced as early as possible, but please plan ahead based on the tentative schedule below.

Tentative Midterm Date: Wednesday 10/21

Extra credit: Helping Others

This course encourages collaboration and uses a reputation bot on the course discord to this end. Students can thank other students by reacting to helpful messages with the :upvote: emoji on the Discord server. Whenever you get thanked this way by a student in the course discord, the reputation bot will also react with a thanks emoji and log the interaction. Extra credit for receiving thanks is logarithmic (5 * log_50_(thanks)), for up to 5% extra credit at 50 thanks received. Abuse of this system is considered a violation of academic integrity.

Extra credit: Memes

Are you a meemer? Meme, and earn grades! If you post an on-topic meme in the #memes channel and we emoji-react to acknowledge it, you will get 0.5% extra credit, to your final grade, per week (A week begins on Sunday and ends the following Monday at midnight MST). In order to foster a good learning community, and encourage creative thinking around the material, you may receive extra credit each week for sharing educational memes in the course discord. It is important to note that memes must be relevant, educational, and non-offensive. No excessively spicy memes please. The course discord bot will acknowledge credited memes with an :upvote: emoji if the meme is approved by the course staff. Good memes might be reviewed in class. Meme extra credit will be at most 5% of your grade.

Help and meme extra credit are hard-capped at a combined 10%!

More Extra Credit: Bug Bounty Program

Any responsibly-disclosed serious security issues in course infrastructure will earn an extra 1 to 25 "bug bounty" percentage points to the reporting student's final grade, depending on the severity of the issue. Blatantly spurious reports may earn a negative percentage report of up to -5 percentage points. Allowances will be made for honest mistakes leading to a spurious bug bounty filing, but please don't waste our time on purpose.

Collaboration Policy

Collaboration is highly encouraged in this course. However, there is a delicate balance between being excessively helpful, and learning. The purpose of course collaboration is understanding concepts. As such, questions and answers should be focused on concepts, and not how to solve challenge X.

The challenges explore important concepts, and so it is fine to discuss the challenges. However, you may not discuss full or significant portions of a challenge's solution. Furthermore, you may not intentionally solve challenges as a group. The assignments must still be solved individually.

Feel free to discuss ideas important to the challenge, or tools which may be useful.

If there is any confusion, just ask! We try to assume good intentions, but egregious violations will result in an academic integrity violation.

Final Grade Calculation

The final grade will be calculated as shown in the assessments section, then adding extra credit. Percentages will be translated to letter grades with the following initial cutoffs:

With the exception of the cutoff for A+, these cutoffs can be curved downward in the event that students do worse than expected.

Generative AI Policy

Generative AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for learning, and it will likely be a critical part of the future of education and software development. However, it can also be extremely detrimental if you rely on it to do the thinking and problem solving for you. If an LLM is doing more of the problem-solving or actual labor than you are, you are not learning the material and that will hurt you both in this course and in your future career.

Your goal while using generative AI in this course should always be to learn, not simply to improve your grade. Asking an LLM or utilizing an LLM agent to solve a challenge for you is not acceptable.

Special Accommodations

Students requesting disability accommodations should register with the Disability Resource Center (DRC) and present the instructor with appropriate documentation from the DRC.

Plagiarism and Cheating

Plagiarism or any form of cheating in assignments or projects is subject to serious academic penalty. To understand your responsibilities as a student read: ASU Student Code of Conduct and ASU Student Academic Integrity Policy. Violation of the academic integrity policy will result in a zero on the assignment and the violation will be reported to the Dean’s office.

Examples of academic integrity violations include (but are not limited to):

• Sharing code with a fellow student (even if it’s only a few lines).
• Collaborating on code with a fellow student (unless explicitly allowed).
• Using another student's solution to solve a challenge and get a flag.
• Sharing a flag with another student (NEVER ALLOWED UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES).

Posting your assignment solutions online is expressly forbidden, and will be considered a violation of the academic integrity policy. Note that this includes working out of a public Github repository. The Github Student Developer Pack provides unlimited private repositories while you are a student, making it easy to begin with a private GitHub repository.

Syllabus Update

Information in the syllabus may be subject to change with reasonable advance notice or an announcement on discord.

Misc

Syllabus copyright 2026 Robert Wasinger, along with all lectures and course-related written materials. During this course students are prohibited from making audio, video, digital, or other recordings during class, or selling notes to or being paid for taking notes by any person or commercial firm without the express written permission of the faculty member teaching this course.

Be reasonable. We're all doing our best.

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