About Exam

Per the course’s syllabus, the exam will be released 2025-04-18T00:00:00-04:00 and will be due 2025-04-27T23:59:00-04:00. There are no extensions or late submissions allowed on the exam, so please plan accordingly. Gradescope will not accept late submissions, nor will the course accept submissions outside of Gradescope. You are very strongly encouraged to not wait until the last moment to submit.

You may spend as much time during the exam window working on the exam as you’d like; there is no time limit other than the final deadline.

The exam itself will be comprehensive, and all of our main topics are fair game to show up. Most questions on the exam are worth four to six points, but typically will be been broken down into several subparts worth one or two points each. You should also expect questions to introduce real-world manifestations of cybersecurity issues we’ve discussed, and connect them back to the course, though sometimes questions will also introduce a new-but-related topic; we are interested in seeing how you might apply the lessons of the course to problems both familiar and unfamiliar. That said, the format of the exam will otherwise largely resemble a long assignment, and your answers should remain in general confined to three sentences, maximum, unless the question otherwise specifies.

We expect each question to take about 30 minutes to work on. We strongly recommend you use the long exam window to break the exam into smaller pieces, tackling a few questions per day, rather than trying to do it all at once.

During the exam itself, it is not permitted to solicit or receive help from any humans (including from the teaching fellows), other than by posting to Ed (which will be restricted to new private, exam-related threads only) for clarifications or administrative questions (we cannot and will not answer content-based questions). This includes, other than use of Ed, a general prohibition on asking any questions in online forums. Collaboration between students is not permitted at all on the exam. Violations of these rules will be treated extremely harshly by the course.

It is otherwise open-book, and you may reference any material to craft your answers, subject to the constraints of the academic honesty policy. The essence of all answers you write must be your own.

Ultimately, how best to prepare depends on how you learn best. But allow us to recommend that you prioritize your studies by:

• Reviewing each lecture’s notes.
• Reviewing each lecture’s slides.
• Watching the recordings of the review sessions.
• Reviewing each lecture’s video, using its table of contents to focus on topics with which you’re less comfortable.
• Reviewing each of the course’s assignments and your feedback thereon (note that we will not have finished grading everyone’s Assignment 4 before the exam).