Course Details

Ever opened a binary in Ghidra, stared at the screen for a while, and wondered where you are supposed to start? This course is for you.

Reverse engineering has traditionally had a pretty intimidating on-ramp: learn assembly, learn operating-system internals, learn a complicated analysis tool, and then - eventually - start figuring out what unfamiliar software actually does. AI changes that equation, but only if you know how to use it without believing everything it tells you.

In this hands-on course, we use Ghidra together with hosted and local AI to explore unfamiliar software one question at a time. Students learn how to get oriented in a binary, make sense of decompiled code, recover useful names and structure, follow interesting behavior, compare related code, and turn a pile of functions into a defensible explanation of what a program is doing.

AI helps us move faster, explain unfamiliar concepts, generate hypotheses, and automate some of the boring parts. Ghidra and the binary itself keep us honest. This is not a ‘click the AI button and let it reversethe binary’ class. Students learn where AI is surprisingly useful, where it confidently gets things wrong, and how to check its answers against actual program evidence.

Most of the course is hands-on. Every student works in an individual lab environment with Ghidra, AI access, exercise binaries, scripts, workflow examples, and BSim resources ready to go. We start small and build toward analyzing unfamiliar software with increasingly less hand-holding.

You do not need to be an experienced reverse engineer. If you understand basic programming concepts and have always wanted to get better at looking inside compiled software, you are in the right place.

For more course details, please visit here.

Details last updated August 18, 2026

About the Instructor: Dr. Kara Nance

Dr. Kara Nance is a recognized authority in software reverse engineering, applied artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity with more than 30 years of experience applying AI and machine learning to complex technical problems. She is the author of The Ghidra Book (No Starch Press, 2020; Second Edition, 2026) and a frequent instructor and speaker on reverse engineering, AI, and cybersecurity. Her recent work focuses on AI-assisted reverse engineering, local AI environments, model evaluation, workflow integration, and practical operational deployment. A longtime university professor and cybersecurity educator, she has developed and delivered hands-on technical training for professional, government, and academic audiences.

About the Instructor: Dr. Brian Hay

Dr. Brian Hay is an applied artificial intelligence researcher, and cybersecurity expert with more than two decades of experience designing and integrating advanced software systems for commercial and U.S. government organizations. He served as Technical Editor for both editions of The Ghidra Book and is a frequent instructor and speaker on AI, software analysis, reverse engineering, and cybersecurity. His recent work focuses on local AI environments, workflow automation, model evaluation, AI-assisted software analysis, and building scalable, maintainable AI frameworks that preserve transparency, repeatability, and technical rigor.