COMP6447 Notices

Midterm update

Posted by Lachlan Waugh 🍉 Tuesday 13 October 2026, 01:17:35 PM.

Quick update, the midterm will be 1hr50mins, running from 5 minutes into the tute, until 5 minutes before the end, not the original planned 1 hour.

We didn't think an hour would be enough to adequately test your understanding of the content, so we decided to give some extra time (the midterm has historically always been 2 hours, so last year's should be a good indicator of difficulty).

Midterm Exam

Posted by Lachlan Waugh 🍉 Thursday 08 October 2026, 06:20:33 PM.

Hey all, some details about the upcoming midterm wargame.

Details:

• There will be 3 exploitation questions (involving topics from buffer overflows, format string and/or shellcode only) to solve, and fetch flags from the server (similar to wargames).
• All instructions are available on the exam website https://midterm.6447.lol/ (this will be made available next week). Make sure you have access to this site, and understand the instructions BEFORE beginning the exam.
• During your tutorial next week, you must attempt and submit this exam. It is worth 10% of the final mark. All submissions must be made within 1 hour of beginning the exam. No late submissions are allowed.
• Once you begin the exam (By pressing "Start"), the website will show you the password to decrypt the challenges, as well as the server Domain and Port for the challenges. You must submit within 1 hour of starting the exam
• The challenge files will be made available at the start of next week.
• Submission will be done using Give (Details will appear on the exam website). The format for submission is available on the exam website

Practice Exam

We have made a practice exam (That will look exactly like the midterm wargame next week) available at https://2025.midterm.6447.lol/.

Help Session Friday 2pm

Posted by Lachlan Waugh 🍉 Wednesday 07 October 2026, 02:10:44 PM.

Hey all, we'll be running a help session this Friday at 2pm in Mathews 101 to help with any course content we have covered so far.

We'll stay as late as students have questions. Note: we won't be preparing content, this is purely going to be an open-air question/answer forum. Come with questions please!

Apologies if the time doesn't work for you. This session won't be recorded or live-streamed!

Welcome to COMP6447

Posted by Adam Tanana Monday 14 September 2026, 09:20:40 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://discourse03.cse.unsw.edu.au/26T3/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 Tuesday, 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 container), 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.