Engineering code quality in Firefox
We had an "open-ended" project in an undergraduate Computer Security course to discover a 0-day in Firefox. The professor (a researcher, not lecturer, by trade) didn't really have a curriculum, and said this artifact accounted for 70-80% of our grade.<p>Trying to compile Firefox was already a challenge. That, and each compile took an hour. IIRC, Firefox is built on some esoteric architecture / design pattern that's definitely beyond the scope of design patterns undergraduate students are familiar with.<p>By the end of the term, no one discovered a 0-day, unsurprising considering half the class didn't even try. There were 90 students in the class, and I ended up being the only person to produce a JS payload that would crash Firefox in one of the newer HTML5 libraries. It's neither a zero-day or exciting or profitable vulnerability though.<p>Realizing everyone in the class would fail, the professor changed the grade of this project to only account for 30% of the grade. I spent most of my time on this project while disregarding the rest of the busy work for the class. In the end, I got a C grade while my peers who didn't even attempt to tackle this project received higher grades.