This blog post is a retrospect on the time that I spent at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri as a part of my Bachelor’s.
Now I am poised to take my next step forward and I have mixed feelings about leaving Amrita. I am excited about exploring opportunities ahead but I am also sad to leave my team and my friends behind.
Looking back, I realise that my time here has helped me in a lot of ways. It has helped me grow professionally and as a person.
How did I end up at Amrita?
Of course, I aimed to get into IITs (Who doesn’t). I even told my teacher – I want to do Computer Science at IIT Bombay (For those who don’t know – that’s like one of the toughest colleges in India to get into). But I had underestimated, how much of a task that was.
Class 12th was probably the most hectic and stressful phase in my life. I got pretty decent ranks in the CBSE board and entrance exams which opened up opportunities to join government colleges in Kerala such as College of Engineering, Trivandrum (CET) and TKM college, Kollam. I had also written a few entrance exams for private colleges and got seats in colleges like VIT, Amrita etc.
At this point of time – I never even had the slightest idea that I would be joining Amrita. I was all set to join at one of the government colleges. One fateful evening, a cousin called to ask about how to college hunt was going and I gave her the updates about which all colleges I was considering. She asked me to consider joining at Amrita School of Engineering, Amritapuri and the reason she gave was because it had team bi0s – the top hacking team in India.
Team bi0s is the student CTF(Capture the Flag) team of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, who actively take part in the international CTFs round the year. bi0s is currently ranked 1st in India and 21st in the world according to Ctftime.org.
https://bi0s.in
Hacking! Now that’s something I was interested in for a while now! And maybe something that pushed me towards Computer Science. So when I heard that Amrita has a really got Cyber Security team – I was intrigued. My cousin put in touch with Vipin Sir – the chief mentor of team bi0s. I told him that I was interested in hacking and he asked me to join Amrita and become a part of team bi0s. Vipin Sir also asked me if I wanted to join in a summer camp that bi0s has every year (yes! before I even joined the college). I decided to give it a try.
I spent 12 days at the Bangalore campus where I interacted with Vipin Sir, a lot of team members of bi0s and even some alumni. I managed to learn a lot in that camp and I was heavily inspired by some of the senior members of the club.
Among them, One of the people who made a huge impact was Anirudh Anand – He had just graduated from Amrita that year. I was in awe with the achievements that he had and I remember thinking to myself whether I would ever be able to achieve something close to what he had.
At the end of the camp – I had no doubt that this was the place I wanted to join! There were a lot of people who told me that Government Colleges were a better choice and that I should stick with them. But my parents were extremely supportive of me and that told me to stick with the decision that I took. And that has made all the difference!
New Beginnings!
As a enthusiastic first year at Amrita you are faced with a lot of opportunities – There are a variety of clubs including the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) club and the ICPC (Competitive Programming) Club. I guess it’s a difficult process to chose – but luckily I had my mind made up before joining the college.
As a part of the team – I spent most of my time training and participating in various CTFs that happen round the year. The University has extended a huge amount of support to the team – We have a fully furnished lab with facilities such as biometric access, good internet speed and even extra hardware such as monitors.
I chose Reverse Engineering (RE) as the category I would focus upon in CTFs (I was confused whether to choose RE or Web Exploitation) – again Vipin Sir was an instrumental part in helping me choosing this. Fast forward four years and I am extremely happy with what I chose.
Most of my first year was spent in polishing up my skills in Reversing, learning python and playing CTFs. At that time since I was the only member in the team doing Reversing – I was mentored by an alumni (who’s name I am not supposed to mention!). I was gently poked towards learning more about operating systems – I found the area really interesting. He provided me with roadmaps to learn about kernel module programming, kernel exploitation and related areas – which I pursued in my spare time apart from CTFs.
I can confidently say that this helped lay the ground work for the next years to come.
Another amazing thing that happened when I was in my first year was that the university decided to give an attendance waiver to all the deserving members of team bi0s – this meant that we no longer needed to have an attendance of 75% in each of the courses to actually attempt the exams. This helped the team a lot as we were able to put in extra hours to learn more and also helped us invest more into playing CTFs. For a while – we played every CTF we could get our hands on!
Onwards and Upwards!
As I mentioned earlier – Amrita has a very active FOSS club. This leads to a lot of members actually working towards GSoC (Google Summer of Code) every year. I was also intrigued when I heard that some of my seniors in bi0s had also done a GSoC during their bachelor’s. So I talked to Vipin Sir about and he told me to go ahead with it. So close to the end of my second year – I decided that I would apply for GSoC.
Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Students work with an open source organization on a 3 month programming project during their break from school.
https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com
GSoC gives a student an opportunity to chose and select from a wide variety of projects. I was really confused about which organisation and project to choose – I was only sure that I wanted to do some project that is related to Security. I was helped by Arvind S Raj who was one of the team’s mentors. He sat with me and helped me go through and understand several projects and several organisations. I ended up choosing to work with NetBSD on porting the Kernel Address Sanitizer to the NetBSD kernel.
My proposal for GSoC was selected and my mentor was Kamil Rytarowski from Poland who was extremely supportive. I had a great experience doing GSoC and I learnt a lot over the Summer (I definitely recommend students to try it!). I didn’t end up completing the project during the Summer and it took the help of another developer to complete it.
After GSoC, I continued working (in-between CTFs and side projects) with NetBSD to add more features to the kernel. I ended up deciding to do another GSoC in 2019 with NetBSD for enhancing the Syzkaller support for NetBSD.
I also had the opportunity to present my work at a few conferences around the globe – I was selected to present at EuroBSDCon in Romania about the work done during GSoC in September 2018. The same year I also presented at BSides Delhi about the Address Sanitizer. In 2019, I had the opportunity to present at the Underground – fuzzing track at Nullcon, Goa about different approaches towards fuzzing in the kernel space and also to talk about evolution of kernel fuzzers in NetBSD at Troopers 19 in Heidelberg, Germany.
New frontiers!
I have had the chance to explore a lot of things during the four years that I have been at Amrita – I have dipped my hands into things as different as Systems development, Machine Learning, NLP and Web development other than security.
As a team we have managed to grow a lot. When I joined bi0s in my first year we were ranked 4th in India and 159th in the world. Four years later, Now we are ranked 1st in India for the consecutive 4th time and 21st in the world according to Ctftime.org.
Since I had done a significant amount of work with the NetBSD organisation, I was given the opportunity to join as a developer with the security team and code quality improvement team. I joined NetBSD as a developer in November 2019. I have had an amazing experience working with the community so far!
I will be going to the University of California, Santa Barbara next month to start my internship there under Professor Giovanni Vigna. I am extremely excited to have the opportunity to work at one of the top academic research labs in the world, and I am waiting to know what all are the next projects that I would get to work on.
Glancing behind!
Looking back! I feel that I am lucky to have joined Amrita. Maybe if I had gone for the safer option and joined a Government College, I wouldn’t have reached this position. It is safe to say – I lucked out in finding a good team and a good mentor.
As I have mentioned earlier – I have received a lot of support from my mentors in the college and the team without which I don’t think I could have accomplished half of what I have in the last four years.
R3xNation 