About Me

I completed an undergraduate degree in Information Systems at the Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS-Pilani) - Pilani Campus (India) between 2009 and 2013. I had the good fortune of working with a ton of smart people on a variety of projects in Robotics, embedded systems and 3D Game Design. I spent my last semester abroad to work on my thesis on Behavioral Analysis of Malware at Software Research Laboratory (SRL) at University of Louisiana at Lafayette (USA) under the joint supervision of Dr. Arun Lakhotia, a professor at UL Lafayette and Dr. K Haribabu, professor at BITS-Pilani. It is here that I got started in Cyber Security and decided to pursue higher studies in the field.

I came to UL Lafayette for what was supposed to be a six-month internship to work on my thesis, but ended up extending the visit to 3 years! During the three years, I worked at SRL as a Research Scholar under Dr. Arun Lakhotia. Here, I created malware, analyzed malware and did everything in between. I learned dynamic program analysis, reverse engineering, and, machine learning as applied to malware. My work at UL resulted in me co-authoring multiple peer-reviewed papers and several talks around the world. 

My research at UL led to the creation of VirusBattle - a cloud-based automated malware analysis web-service. VirusBattle was presented at BlackHat-US-2015. The technology has since been licensed to Cythereal Inc. for commercialization.

I recently completed my Ph.D. at the University of Verona (Italy), under the supervision of Dr. Roberto Giacobazzi. At Verona, I am focusing on challenges in the approximate computation of non-computable problems. To that end, I have proposed a computation model that leverages Information Theory, Computability Theory and Abstract Interpretation to permit an information-centric view of computation. I am studying the mathematical properties of approximations made by program analyzers (Abstract Interpreters) and Machine Learners. I believe that both program analysis and machine learning community are computing approximate solutions to similar non-computable fixpoint equations; And that researchers in either field may potentially benefit in understanding the constraints of problems and corresponding solution techniques employed by the researchers in the other field.