Posts

In this blog post, I’ll take you on my first time journey into the world of mobile application security through a bizarre yet real app called The Social Nedwork, a niche social media platform where only people named Ned can post. Armed with curiosity, an old iPhone, and minimal prior experience, I discovered vulnerabilities, responsibly disclosed them, and learned an incredible amount along the way. This adventure started an unassuming Thursday evening when I came home from work to find my family hanging out....

Introduction The past semester I conducted research with Utah State University’s Center for Anticipatory Intelligence, examining the resilience of the Texas natural gas industry. Alongside interviews with five subject matter experts from Baker Tilly, ZGlobal, Vistra Corp, and Pacific Northwest National Lab, we utilized ExaGO to simulate the impact of cyberattacks on Texas critical infrastructure. This blog post will focus on the technical side of our simulations, rather than our overall analysis and findings....

ExaGO is an high-performance power grid optimization program for stochastic, security-constrained, and multi-period AC optimal power flow problems. It was designed to be run on supercomputers to simulate thousands of different scenarios on the power grid, such as cyberattacks and natural disasters. This guide will show you how to run ExaGO on consumer hardware so you can simulate and visualize the powergrid for yourself, no supercomputer required! It can be easily installed in a virtual machine or Windows Subsystem for Linux....

This past weekend I participated in the 2023 HackTheBox University challenge, which was a very humbling experience. Our team ultimately ended up finding only 2 of 22 total flags, struggling on the easiest challenges. Nevertheless, it was a fun learning experience and it’s got me feeling motivated to continue learning. I took a crack at the first reverse engineering problem, remembered I’m a script kiddie, then settled on cryptography. After netcating into the server, I was greeted with the following:...

Note from future me: this article is now pretty irrelevant because I helped write some code and documentation to have JoinLater automatically configure itself with NetworkManager! Pretty neat. Intro SecureW2’s JoinNow is used across many college campuses to enroll and configure personal smartphones, tablets, and laptops to secure “eduroam” wireless networks. Unfortunately, their support for Linux is limited to devices running GNOME and systemd, which is problematic for many FOSS enthusiasts who love to overly rice their obscure distro of choice....

If you can see this, it means I’ve finally got my website configured. Cheers!