David Mohaisen

Course Offerings and Outcomes

CAP 5150 Foundations of Security & Privacy Fall 2025 Enrollment: 120 Rating: NA
CAP 6640 Natural Language Understanding Spring 2025 Enrollment: 69 Rating: 4.5/5
CAP 5150 Foundations of Security & Privacy Fall 2024 Enrollment: 113 Rating: 4.0/5
CAP 5150 Foundations of Security & Privacy Fall 2022 Enrollment: 52 Rating: 4.2/5
CAP 5150 Foundations of Security & Privacy Fall 2021 Enrollment: 32 Rating: 4.2/5
CAP 5150 Foundations of Security & Privacy Spring 2021 Enrollment: 21 Rating: 4.5/5
CAP 6640 Natural Language Understanding Spring 2021 Enrollment: 43 Rating: 4.2/5
CAP 5150 Foundations of Security & Privacy Spring 2020 Enrollment: 17 Rating: 4.0/5
CAP 6640 Natural Language Understanding Spring 2020 Enrollment: 48 Rating: 4.2/5
CAP 6640 Natural Language Understanding Spring 2019 Enrollment: 51 Rating: 4.0/5
CIS 4361 Secure OS & Administration Spring 2019 Enrollment: 59 Rating: 3.9/5
CIS 4615 Secure Software Dev. & Assurance Fall 2018 Enrollment: 23 Rating: 4.5/5
CIS 4615 Secure Software Dev. & Assurance Fall 2017 Enrollment: 22 Rating: 3.7/5
CAP 6133 Advanced Security & Forensics Fall 2017 Enrollment: 12 Rating: 4.6/5
CAP 5150 Foundations of Security & Privacy Spring 2017 Enrollment: 25 Rating: 4.0/5
CAP 6133 Advanced Security & Forensics Fall 2016 Enrollment: 24 Rating: 4.6/5
CAP 6133 Advanced Security & Forensics Fall 2016 Enrollment: 10 Rating: 5.0/5

Developed Courses

CAP 5150: Foundations of Computer Security and Privacy (Graduate)

This course offers a rigorous and in-depth introduction to the foundations of computer security, blending theoretical principles with practical applications. Students will develop a solid understanding of core security concepts such as confidentiality, integrity, and availability, while learning to think critically through threat modeling, risk assessment, and adversarial analysis. The curriculum covers essential technical areas, including cryptographic primitives, secure communication protocols, and modern authentication and access control mechanisms. Security is examined across multiple layers of computing systems—operating systems, networks, web applications, and software—with a focus on real-world vulnerabilities and defenses. Specialized topics include malware analysis and reverse engineering, mobile and IoT security, and the complexities of cloud and virtualization platforms. The course also explores cutting-edge areas like privacy-enhancing technologies, adversarial machine learning, and graph and social networks security. Ethical, legal, and governance considerations are integrated throughout, preparing students to navigate the broader societal impacts of cybersecurity.

CAP 6133: Advanced Topics in Computer Security and Computer Forensic (Graduate)

This course tracks advances in computer security and forensics in recent years. Topics included cover a range of emerging threats, attacks, and defenses. Topical scope of this includes malware, botnets, smartphone security, transport security, security economics, social networks security, and web security. A substantial part of the course is a semester-long project on one of the topics taught in the course.

CIS 4615: Secure Software Dev. & Assurance

The course covers software security, terms, and definitions, including threat modeling, secure software development lifecycle and touchpoints, risk management frameworks, and their incorporation into the secure software development lifecycle. It also addresses common criteria and why they are needed, common bad software development practices and how to avoid them, and instances of bad practices that would result in actual threats due to buffer overflow, dangling pointers, memory leakage, etc. As application areas, the course will also cover software security for the web, networks, and cryptographic tools, associated attack vectors, and the corresponding secure software development practices associated with them.

CIS 4361: Secure Operating Systems and Administration (Undergraduate)

This is an undergraduate course on operating system security, mainly focusing on the Linux Operating System, and will cover the following: running Linux in a virtual environment, securing user accounts, securing servers using firewalls (including a dive into iptables and nftables), encrypting and SSH hardening (including key management), and access control. We will cover these aspects of operating system security in both Ubuntu and CentOS. Some prior knowledge of operating systems is required for this course.

CAP 6640: Computer Understanding of Natural Language (Graduate)

This is an advanced course on natural language processing, and covers recent advances on the subject, including the following: introduction to word vectors, word vectors and word senses, backpropagation, neural networks, linguistic structures and dependency parsing, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for language models, vanishing gradient and advanced RNN variants, machine translation, seq2seq and attention mechanisms, CNNs for NLP, subword models, contextual representation and pretraining, neural natural language generation, coreference resolution, multi-task learning, large language models, reasoning models, as well as topics in safety, bias, fairness, and ethics.

Research Courses

CAP 7919-0044 Research Fall 2025 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7919-0004 Doctoral Research Fall 2025 Enrollment: 1
CAP 7980-C032 Dissertation Summer 2025 Enrollment: 2
CAP 7980-0030 Dissertation Spring 2025 Enrollment: 3
CNT 6971-0004 Thesis Research Spring 2025 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7919-0004 Doctoral Research Spring 2025 Enrollment: 2
CNT 7980-0004 Dissertation Spring 2025 Enrollment: 1
EEL 7980-0046 Dissertation Spring 2025 Enrollment: 1
CAP 7980-0021 Dissertation Fall 2024 Enrollment: 2
CNT 6971-0004 Thesis Research Fall 2024 Enrollment: 1
COT 7919-0010 Research Fall 2024 Enrollment: 1
EEL 7980-0057 Dissertation Fall 2024 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7919-C004 Doctoral Research Summer 2024 Enrollment: 4
IDS 7980-C024 Dissertation Summer 2024 Enrollment: 1
CAP 7980-0028 Dissertation Spring 2024 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7919-0004 Doctoral Research Spring 2024 Enrollment: 3
CNT 7980-0004 Dissertation Spring 2024 Enrollment: 1
COT 7919-0010 Research Spring 2024 Enrollment: 1
IDS 7980-0031 Dissertation Spring 2024 Enrollment: 1
CAP 6971-0024 Thesis Research Fall 2023 Enrollment: 1
CAP 7980-0021 Dissertation Fall 2023 Enrollment: 1
CDA 7919-0007 Research Fall 2023 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7919-0004 Doctoral Research Fall 2023 Enrollment: 2
CNT 7980-0004 Dissertation Fall 2023 Enrollment: 3
IDS 7980-0036 Dissertation Fall 2023 Enrollment: 1
CAP 6971-C025 Thesis Research Summer 2023 Enrollment: 1
CAP 7980-C032 Dissertation Summer 2023 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7919-C004 Doctoral Research Summer 2023 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7980-C004 Dissertation Summer 2023 Enrollment: 3
IDS 7919-B001 Doctoral Research Summer 2023 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7919-0004 Doctoral Research Spring 2023 Enrollment: 5
CNT 7980-0004 Dissertation Spring 2023 Enrollment: 1
COT 7919-0010 Research Spring 2023 Enrollment: 1
IDS 7919-0018 Doctoral Research Spring 2023 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7919-0004 Doctoral Research Fall 2022 Enrollment: 4
CNT 7980-0004 Dissertation Fall 2022 Enrollment: 1
IDS 7919-0029 Doctoral Research Fall 2022 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7919-C004 Doctoral Research Summer 2022 Enrollment: 2
CNT 7980-C004 Dissertation Summer 2022 Enrollment: 1
EEL 7919-C111 Research Summer 2022 Enrollment: 1
CNT 6908-0004 Independent Study Spring 2022 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7919-0004 Doctoral Research Spring 2022 Enrollment: 2
CNT 7980-0004 Dissertation Spring 2022 Enrollment: 3
EEL 7919-0104 Research Spring 2022 Enrollment: 1
IDS 7919-0017 Doctoral Research Spring 2022 Enrollment: 1
CNT 6908-0004 Independent Study Fall 2021 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7919-0004 Doctoral Research Fall 2021 Enrollment: 5
CNT 7980-0004 Dissertation Fall 2021 Enrollment: 3
IDS 7919-0029 Doctoral Research Fall 2021 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7919-C004 Doctoral Research Summer 2021 Enrollment: 2
CNT 7980-C004 Dissertation Summer 2021 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7919-0004 Doctoral Research Spring 2021 Enrollment: 4
CNT 7980-0004 Dissertation Spring 2021 Enrollment: 3
CNT 7919-0004 Doctoral Research Fall 2020 Enrollment: 6
CNT 7980-0004 Dissertation Fall 2020 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7980-C004 Dissertation Summer 2020 Enrollment: 4
CNT 6908-0004 Independent Study Spring 2020 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7919-0004 Doctoral Research Spring 2020 Enrollment: 2
CNT 7980-0004 Dissertation Spring 2020 Enrollment: 6
CNT 6908-0004 Independent Study Fall 2019 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7919-0004 Doctoral Research Fall 2019 Enrollment: 2
CNT 7980-0004 Dissertation Fall 2019 Enrollment: 7
CNT 7919-C004 Doctoral Research Summer 2019 Enrollment: 4
CNT 7980-C004 Dissertation Summer 2019 Enrollment: 4
CNT 7919-0004 Doctoral Research Spring 2019 Enrollment: 7
CNT 7980-0004 Dissertation Spring 2019 Enrollment: 4
CNT 7919-0004 Doctoral Research Fall 2018 Enrollment: 6
CNT 7919-C004 Doctoral Research Summer 2018 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7980-C004 Dissertation Summer 2018 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7919-0004 Doctoral Research Spring 2018 Enrollment: 1
COP 7919-0009 Research Spring 2018 Enrollment: 1
COP 7980-0009 Dissertation Spring 2018 Enrollment: 1
CNT 7919-0005 Doctoral Research Fall 2017 Enrollment: 5
COP 7980-0009 Dissertation Fall 2017 Enrollment: 1

Website last updated on 04/28/2019