COM SCI M138
Computer System Security
Lecture and lab. The registrar has published a final exam time.
Fall 2026: 1 lecture and 2 discussions. Nothing here is open. The oldest of these readings was 4 hours ago.
Also listed as EC ENGR M117 (closed, 140 of 140 enrolled, majors only): the same class, and each department holds its own seats and its own grade history.
Grades
Grade records describe outcomes. For what a course is like to take, read student reviews written on dibs below or follow the separate external review link.
Workload and assignments
Work types reported in BruinWalk reviews of this course, across recorded instructors and terms. They may differ from this term's syllabus.
dibs has not read this course’s reviews, so it cannot say what kind of work it sets. That is dibs not having looked. It is not a course without papers or exams, and the reviews linked below are the answer until dibs catches up.
What comes first
The chain dibs can see is 3 courses long before COM SCI M138. dibs has read a class page for every course in it.
Counted in courses rather than quarters: dibs does not know which of them a department lets you take together.
From the registrar's catalog
(Same as Electrical and Computer Engineering M117.) Lecture, four hours; laboratory, one hour; outside study, seven hours. Requisite: course 33. Recommended requisite: course 111. Introduction to fundamental knowledge of computer system security. Students gain understanding of exploit techniques; learn to use the security tools; learn to design and implement secure systems; and learn concepts of computer security including software vulnerability analysis and defense, web security, mobile security, and network security. Covers the latest security topics in practice (e.g., cryptocurrency), and in research (e.g., state-of-the-art fuzzing techniques and machine-learning-based security analysis). Students get hands-on experience in analyzing and designing secure systems. Includes course project for cutting-edge security research. Letter grading.
Sections in Fall 2026
You enroll in the discussion, not the lecture, so a discussion's status is the one that decides whether you get in. A lecture can read open while every discussion under it is full.
Seat counts as of : the oldest of these 3 readings. Seat readings are snapshots, not live availability. Their timestamps show when dibs last checked.
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Lec 1 MW 4:00pm-5:50pmClosed by the department
Tian, Y.
no grade historyno enrollment count published no history
2 discussions, none open. There is no waitlist either, so the only way in is somebody dropping the lecture.
From the people who took it
Student reviews
What taking COM SCI M138 was like: the work, the teaching, and what students wish they’d known.
Your experience could be the first.
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Seats over time in Fall 2026
How each lecture has filled since dibs first saw it.
A dot is a reading where something moved: the seat count, the status, or the waitlist.
What a flat run means, and where a line starts
Flat between dots means it did not drift, it held and then jumped, and a line starts when dibs first saw that lecture rather than reaching back before it existed. A lecture that has never moved draws a flat line across the whole window, and one with two or three readings draws a line joining them, which is too few to read a trend from.
Lec 1 · Tian, Y. · -
Nothing read since 2 Oct, 3 hours ago. Over about 1 month before that, unchanged.
Both readings say 0 seats.
How readings and alerts work
A reading and an hourly record are different things, and most charts here hold more of the second missing than present. dibs has taken readings of a section since long before it began keeping an hour-by-hour log of when it looked, so the empty stretches are dibs saying it was not keeping that log yet, not that it looked and found nothing. That is the age of the record and not a fault.
Seat counts show the last successful read, not live availability. Refreshes can be delayed by request limits or upstream interruptions. Watched sections receive priority, but an hourly update for every section is not guaranteed.
The registrar can change a seat count between our checks. Alerts depend on dibs detecting an opening and completing delivery; a quiet watch does not prove that no seat opened. Check the registrar before enrolling.