I'm a PhD Scholar in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at BITS Pilani KK Birla Goa Campus, working at the intersection of hardware security, RISC-V architectures, and low-level software. My current work spans side-channel mitigation, formal verification of cache coherency, and ML-based malware analysis on embedded binaries. Earlier, I designed Ku/X-band antennas at KIIT, and I have six patents filed in the RISC-V space covering data-flow integrity, crypto engines, and on-chip ML.
Outside of research, I spend a lot of time building things close to the metal. I've written a TCP/IP stack from scratch, a malloc replacement, a cycle-accurate 6502 emulator, a container runtime using raw namespaces and seccomp, a bytecode VM in Go, and neural networks built purely from matrix operations. This is not an exhaustive list, I keep adding projects to my profile as a hobby. I also write about these topics on my blog, where I've published posts on architecture, compilers, and C. And I teach sometimes.
Low-level stuff intrigues me. A C program is nothing but bytes in memory, there is no abstraction beyond that. Sure, memory is made of transistors and semiconductors, and VLSI gives us gates and voltages and whatnot, but C, and the assembly it compiles to, is quite magical. I know exactly what it is going to do, and nothing is hidden. It is the naked, and quite often the bitter, truth. More than low levels per se, to borrow from category theory, I am interested in the stripped-down, non-abstracted, naked-truth stuff.