For the last 4-5 days, I’ve been spending a large amount of time investigating a bug and figuring out its fix. This meant, diving into rabbit holes, going deeper and deeper and surrounding myself with documentation and online discussion forums. I’m briefly outlining the process here mostly because I’m pretty proud of what I did.

High level Overview of Steps to Unpack UPX dynamically

1. Find the original entry point of the packed file
2. Run Scylla to extract the payload out
3. Turn on the IMAGE_FILE_RELOCS_STRIPPED flag inside the extracted PE file

1. Open source contributions to x64dbg
2. Reimplementing AutoYARA in Python
3. AI Assistant for Binary Debugging
4. Operating System in C++
5. OffensiveZoe - Malware Detection System and Adversarial Sample Generation
6. Deploy compartmentalized 5G Network in a server environment
7. Create a geographical heatmap tool using ReactJS Kepler
8. A MindMap tool for Visualizing Learning Theory using Ruby on Rails and RDD
9. Deploy Honeypots and observe attacks on unadvertised SSH ports
10. Biometric Authentication System Using Partial Homomorphic Encryption
11. ExpOSNITC - A minimal operating system
12. SaaS system for an invoice processing system using ReactJS - AutoInfer
13. An AngularJS app used for governmental information dissemination

Creating YARA rules to match against malware files using Machine Learning Model. This was for a course project, where we were supposed to come up with some improvement on an existing paper. So we decided to see if we can get AutoYara up and running and then maybe do some experiments on it. The link to the original work is… Here. Oh and by ‘we’ that I use throughout this post, I mean me and my friend Soumya. We also took the guidance of Dr.Marcus Botacin who was gracious enough to give his two cents about our issues, even though it was not his course or anything.

On a path to understand the widely famed power of Awk. Hope to conquer it one day, just for the sake of it. Sed is the next one on the bucket list

So, my initial plan to create this blog was to build it from scratch, brick by brick, maybe even make a content management system on the way. However, due to a lack of time and a general decision in life to stop rebuilding the wheel every single time, I decided to use something someone wise has already built.

For my course in TAMU - ML Based Cyber Defense under Dr. Botacin, throughout the semester I had to make summaries for different research papers in the domain. During each class, a student had to give a seminar on a research paper and the others had to prepare a summary on the paper as well as the discussion that followed the seminar. I am uploading all of the summaries that I created into this blog. But fair warning, finishing the summaries as soon as possible for the sake of submission, in the midst of all other course work doesn’t always lead to the best quality writing.

For the course “ML Based CyberDefenses” under Dr.Botacin we had a very interesting and hands-on in-class competition. You form teams, and then each team come up with a malware detection system as well as generate some adversarial samples (samples that are designed to evade the ML detection models) using existing malware files. The adversarial samples that our “competitors” came up with would be put against our detection system, and vice versa to decide how much points each team scores. Luckily, I was able to find a team that valued team-building as importantly as actual work leading to a lot of fun memories. Big Shout out to SidBav, Soumya and Veronika. And to Zoe our team-mascot (Not to brag, but I won her from a claw machine first try)