Experiences

Offensive Security Engineer @ Calif.io

June 2025 - Present
Working on cool stuffs
Stay tuned!

Security Research Internship @ TRAPA Security

September 2023 - July 2024
Extracted and analyzed firmware from multiple IoT devices
Found a new vulnerability in the Realtek SDK [HITCON2024][Bside Bloomington]

Full-stack Developer @ Freelance

September 2023 - Present
Designed and developed a full-stack application for Nippon Signal

IT Internship @ CTS Corporation

May 2023 - August 2023
Integrated existing policy with security standards and identified gaps during security audits
Used scripting to analyze data from automated network vulnerability scanning tools
Migrated documentation into a centralized location and created appropriate counterparts for the new systems introduced

Undergraduate Research Assistant @ Purdue University PurSecLab

December 2022 - May 2023
Researched control-flow integrity technology in the Linux kernel
Replicated CVEs in newer kernels using qemu

President @ B01lers CTF team

August 2022 - July 2023
Placed 10th among all U.S. CTF teams on CTFtime in 2022
Arranged callouts and boot camps with 100+ participants
Introduced advanced security ideas to newcomers in an approachable manner

Teaching Assistant @ AIS3

July 2022
Guided 150 participants in advanced information security lectures
Assisted 20 participants in generating ideas for security projects related to current technologies
Enhanced my understanding of modern automobile security and its interactions with surrounding systems

Education

Purdue University

BS in Cybersecurity | Class of 2025
Graduated with Highest Distinction, GPA 3.99 / 4.0

Competition and Awards

Mitre eCTF 2025 (with Purdue)

February 2025 - May 2025
2nd Place / 139 teams

International Cybersecurity Challenge (with Team Asia)

November 2024
2nd Place

HITCON CTF 2024 (with TWN48)

July 2024 - November 2024
Created 4 challenges for the qualifier and [redacted] for the final.

DEFCON CTF 2024 (with if this works we’ll get less next year)

August 2024
7th Place (Final) / 10th Place (Qualifier) / 263 teams

SECCON CTF 2023 (with ${CyStick})

September 2023 - December 2023
3rd Place (Final) / 2nd Place (Qualifier) / 653 teams

HITCON CTF 2023 (with TWN48)

August 2023 - November 2023
Created 3 challenges for the qualifier and 1 challenge for the final

Mitre eCTF 2023 (with Purdue)

February 2023 - May 2023
6th Place / 80 teams | Best Poster Award

CSAW CTF 2022 (with B01lers)

December 2022
13th Place (Final) / 6th Place (Qualifier) / 880 teams

DEFCON CTF 2022 (with [email protected])

August 2022
9th Place (Final) / 2nd Place (Qualifier) / 470 teams

HackIN 2021 (with B01lers)

November 2021
3rd Place / 30 teams

Mitre eCTF 2021 (with Purdue)

February 2021 - May 2021
8th Place / 16 teams
My implementation: https://github.com/bronson113/2021-ectf-purdue

HITCON CTF 2020 (with Goburin')

December 2020
2nd Place (Final) / 3rd Place (Qualifier) / 710 teams

AIS3 2019

July 2019
Best Project Award

Project

Cute Floating Ghost

July 2023 | Shader, GLSL, Ray marching
This animation was created using ray marching and shader math. I drew a ghost that floats and moves in the ocean.
There will be a blog post about this! Stay tuned!

Ascii art web server

April 2023 - May 2023 | Server, Concurrency, OS
This project created a server with a web interface that takes an image URL and converts it to ASCII art. The server spawns worker threads and distributes incoming connections across them to allow concurrent processing. It also experiments with the new proc_fd interface and the ability to pass file descriptors to a different process.

Padding Oracle On Custom Padding Methods

March 2023 - April 2023 | Cryptography, Block Cipher
Discovered an efficient attack method against a novel padding method proposed in this conference paper
Created a CTF challenge based on the attack method in HITCON CTF

Vulnerability Explorer

January 2023 - Present | Python, Flask, Compiler | Note: this project is still in the idea phase
Visualized execution of vulnerable program graphically for better comprehension
Implemented a simplified compiler for easy experimentation

mktmpdir

January 2023 | Shellscript, Bash
This is a simple shell script that drops the user into a temporary folder. It allows users to run small experiments without worrying about disrupting their folder structure. The script supports keeping the temporary folder afterward and naming the session.

Raspberry PI Remote Display Server

December 2021 | Python, Flask, LCD display
Designed interaction between a web server and a hardware LCD screen
Allowed easy management of remote display with real-time monitoring
Implemented a simple database for swapping previously displayed images

Ferris Sweep Keyboard

December 2021 | Micro-controller, Keyboard, Soldering
I built my own keyboard using the Ferris Sweep 34-key design. I used a nice-nano microcontroller along with the ZMK firmware to support Bluetooth connectivity. The link above points to the ZMK config I used during the build.

This Blog Website

September 2021 - current | Jekyll, Markdown, HTML, CSS
This website was originally created from a Jekyll blog template by Chad Baldwin. I later expanded it to suit my needs.
The components updated include:
  • The theme for the navigation bar
  • Tag filter in page archive, taken mostly from TeXt theme
  • A separate about-me page
  • Back to top button
Link to source code: https://github.com/bronson113/bronson113.github.io

Code Optimization on Pattern Matching Algorithm

June 2021 | C++, Optimization, Cache
Implemented the FM-index algorithm with ideal time complexity
Applied optimization such as loop unrolling and compression to minimize cache miss-rate
Achieved 41x runtime efficiency compared to the naive implementation

Adversarial Example Generator

July 2019 | Machine Learning, Python
Adversarial examples are inputs that are incorrectly identified by machine learning models. This project aimed to create a model that could automatically generate adversarial examples.
This project was built at AIS3 2019 and won the Best Project Award.

Battle Starship

January 2018
This is a minigame made with single-page HTML and JavaScript.
Credit to donnie9171 for the original idea and prototype in Scratch.