Notices

  • Mac Setup Tutorial

    Posted by Adam Tanana Monday 22 September 2025, 04:01:44 PM.

    Hey all, hope your week is going well and the first set of wargames went smoothly.

    Some students have reached out regarding difficulty setting up the environment on an ARM Mac. We have put together a tutorial at https://guides.6447.lol/mac that you can follow to hopefully setup a local environment on one of these devices, or a guide on how to setup a DigitalOcean droplet.

  • Welcome to COMP6447

    Posted by Adam Tanana Saturday 13 September 2025, 03:52:40 PM.

    Hey everyone.

    Hope you are all super excited to take COMP6447 this term. Before we start the First Lecture, some quick admin to sort out

    Course Forum

    This year we will be using Discourse as the course forum. Please sign up and login using https://discourse02.cse.unsw.edu.au/25T3/COMP6447/ . This will be the best place to get help from either your peers, tutors or me throughout the course. The best way to reach course staff will be either through Discourse or via Email.

    Course Outline

    The course outline is available on WebCMS. Please review it, it has important information about the course content and examinations.

    Classes In Person

    The lectures for this term are on Mondays, and will be covering content that is critical to both the weekly tutorials, and weekly wargames. It is super important that you are able to attend lectures and tutorials where possible. There are no online classes this term (Please reach out if this is a problem ASAP). We will try to record all lectures and release them (But make no promises to release them before your tutorials)

    Some resources to look at before we begin

    To help you prepare for this course, we've come up with a list of helpful prerequisite knowledge that you should revise (or skim over for the first time) before starting the course. These include:

    • How process memory is laid out
      • pointers
      • endianness
    • Difference between regions of memory (stack, heap, text, data)
    • Virtual memory/page table
    • Difference between kernel vs user space
    • Familiarity with using Linux, and Linux general knowledge
      • Linux file system
      • system calls
      • etc.
    • Familiarity with using GDB and python

    If you aren't familiar with some of these topics, that's fine. I recommend reviewing them before starting the course to make your experience smoother.

    I also recommend you have access to a Linux machine, A Linux Virtual Machine (or docker contains), with PwnTools , PwnDBG and BinaryNinja installed. These will be required to do many of the challenges in this Course. If you have issues installing anything, that's fine (Lab 1 is about helping you get ready, so no need to panic if you are unsure about anything).

    Also, I've setup 4 polls under Activities to better guage everyone's understanding of different topcis. Please take a look when you get a chance.

Upcoming Due Dates


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