Security Competitions

DARPA FIRE Hackathon — 2026

Reverse-engineered 100 corrupted and obfuscated embedded binaries to recover processor architecture, vendor/platform characteristics, and firmware family, including identification of firmware such as ArduPilot and Betaflight.

I built a Capstone-based disassembly and classification pipeline on-site, prototyped with LLM assistance, which returned correct identifications for 70–75% of targets. Results were cross-validated against teammates’ Binary Ninja analyses to confirm attributions. Our seven-person team’s submission won the competition.

MITRE embedded Capture the Flag (eCTF) — 2026

Led Penn State’s five-person team and designed the security architecture for a hardware security module (HSM) providing secure file storage and transfer on the MSPM0L2228 board. Coordinated system design, implementation, and security analysis across the defensive design and offensive evaluation phases. The team placed 22nd of 119.

CyberAuto Challenge — 2026

Conducted authorized security analysis of EV charging infrastructure, identifying multiple security-relevant weaknesses across embedded/Linux system components and configuration boundaries. Findings were validated through proof-of-concept testing and reported under NDA.