Policies and support

The course-wide rules for late work, extensions, academic integrity and getting help.

SLOP4000 runs on four rules, set by Professor Ivan Sidorov and Professor Fulan Al-Fulani: what conduct the subject matter demands, what an AI tool may and may not do for you, how to reach the two of them, and what staying enrolled across a semester of labs that each depend on the last requires.

Code of conduct#

SLOP4000 studies hostile software as an engineering discipline, and that subject matter is exactly why its code of conduct is not boilerplate. Every lab, every lecture example and both assessments are scoped to deliberately benign samples run inside simulated, disposable environments: curiosity about how the material works is the whole point of enrolling, but real malice, a real target, or code built to do real harm is never in scope, on this course or any other. Work that reaches outside a simulated environment, whether against a real host, a real network, or another student’s system, is treated as a conduct matter first and a grading matter second, regardless of how competent the work is.

The same standard extends to how you discuss the material outside class: techniques covered here are taught for analysis and defence, and sharing anything built on this course’s material for use against a real target is a breach of the same conduct this section sets, not a separate rule.

AI use and integrity#

A course whose subject is deception has an unusually direct stake in knowing whose work is whose. You may use generative tools to explore ideas, check your understanding, or tidy a draft, but the architecture decisions in Assessment 1 and the infiltration, persistence and evasion choices you defend in Assessment 2 have to be judgements you made and can explain, not output you are relaying. Where a tool materially shaped a submission, say so plainly in the write-up rather than leaving it to be inferred. Undisclosed use that stands in for your own analysis is treated as a breach of academic integrity, the same as it would be on any other piece of assessed work.

Assessment 2 in particular is judged on the report as much as the outcome: a flag retrieved without a defensible account of how you found and kept access to it does not demonstrate what the assessment is designed to measure.

Communication#

There is no discussion board standing between you and the people running this course. General questions about the syllabus, the labs or either assessment go directly to Professor Sidorov, the Course Convenor, or Professor Al-Fulani, the Co-Convenor, both of whom are named on the People page, and either can answer. Because each week’s lab builds directly on the lifecycle stage the last one covered, a threat model feeding an architecture, an architecture feeding an execution strategy, and so on through to the operational-security work in the closing weeks, a question left unresolved for a week compounds rather than waiting quietly, so it should be raised as soon as it arises rather than at the following week’s lab.

Enrolment#

SLOP4000 runs weekly from 27 July to 12 November 2027, with a mid-semester break built into the schedule rather than a fixed weekly cadence throughout. Because the ten labs form a single progression, each one assuming the lifecycle stage the previous lab produced, from an initial threat model through to the attribution and operational-security work that closes it, enrolling after Week 1 means arriving without the foundation the next lab is written to assume, not simply missing a mark. Anyone enrolling late should contact Professor Sidorov or Professor Al-Fulani before their first lab so the gap can be named honestly rather than discovered partway through it.