The projects in CS 136 are the most fun homeworks I've worked on during my time at UCLA. You things like recovered encrypted files, perform a SQL injection, and intercept network traffic via a man-in-the-middle attack. They're super practical and not too difficult. The last lab is a group report on a security audit of an open source piece of software.

If you've had Reiher for other classes like 111, he lectures in the exact same style of basically reading through his slides and throwing information at you. He also usually teaches at 8am. I took this class online, and it was really nice to be able to 2x lectures and watch them at a reasonable hour.

Both the midterm and final were all multiple choice and basic facts from the lecture. For open-book tests, it wasn't too hard to look up all the info. Some of the questions were only covered in the textbook, not in lecture.

The labs we did in this class were pretty cool. I especially enjoyed the computer forensics lab where we had to figure out if people's systems had been hacked and try to recover data. The midterm was online, open-book, open-note, and multiple-choice, but it was still difficult. Luckily, lectures were recorded so I could watch them later and avoid getting up for an 8 am class. Overall, I found the material in this class to be very interesting and would definitely recommend it!