Graduation Date: August 2019

Akash Trehan B akash.trehan123@gmail.com

Í https://www.akashtrehan.com/
Github: https://github.com/CodeMaxx

Education
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (July ’15 – Present)
B.Tech. (Hons) in Computer Science & Engineering
GPA: 9.73/10 (2nd among 121 students)

Publications
{ R. Shah*, A. Shirke*, A. Trehan*, M. Vutukuru & P. Kulkarni
pcube: Primitives for network data plane programming
IEEE ICNP 2018 (Presented at the P4 European Workshop, colocated with ICNP)
DOI: 10.1109/ICNP.2018.00060 [Link]
∗
Co-first authors (ordered by last name)
{ A. Bichhawat, A. Trehan, J. Yang, & M. Fredrikson
Estrela: Automated Policy Enforcement Across Remote APIs (preprint)
arXiv:1811.08234 [cs.CR] [Link]

Internships and RnD Projects

• Framework for Enforcing Security Policies in API based Web Apps (May ’18 – Sept ’18)
Guide: Prof. Jean Yang Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
{ Developed a language-agnostic approach to specify and enforce privacy policies on REST APIs for database-
backed apps
{ Implemented approach on top of Python Django REST framework with expressive cell-level, query-sensitive
permissions
{ Developed case studies and automated testing to demonstrate reasonable performance overheads

• Improving Fuzzing of Javascript Engines (May ’17 – July ’17)

Guide: Prof. Giovanni Vigna and Prof. Christopher Kruegel University of California, Santa Barbara
{ Used instrumentation-guided genetic algorithms in fuzzers to trigger unexpected behaviour in JS Engines
{ Made modifications to American Fuzzy Lop in C language which resulted in faster block coverage
{ Found a bug in Apple Safari’s javascript interpreter - JavaScriptCore
{ Generated environments for automated running of experiments using kubernetes and docker

• pcube: Primitives for network data plane programming (Jan ’18 – Aug ’18’)
Guide: Prof. Mythili Vutukuru IIT Bombay
{ Implement a distributed Stateful Load Balancer in P4 using proactive and reactive communication
{ Used python Scapy to generate network traffic and extract useful statistics out of PCAP files
{ Implemented a framework that provides primitives to simplify the development of P4-based applications

• Bachelor Thesis: Blocktree - Solving Blockchain Scalability Problems (July ’18 – Present)
Guide: Prof. Manoj M. Prabhakaran IIT Bombay
{ Designed and analysed a new permissioned and general-purpose distributed data structure with flexible policies,
to address scalability issues in Blockchain in terms of both storage and computation power
{ Developing a proof of concept python implementation of the algorithms and network protocols for it
{ Theoretically proved security and robustness of the construction in various adversarial environments

• Isolated Network Infrastructure for Security Experiments (Dec ’16 – May ’17)
Guide: Prof. R.K. Shyamasundar IIT Bombay
{ Set up a network of VMs mimicking an infrastructure with a DNS, Mail, Proxy, Web and Time server
{ Used vagrant combined with VirtualBox to ease the process automatic generation of VMs
{ Demonstrated dictionary attacks, stack smashing and Man-in-the-Middle attacks using the infrastructure
 Awards and Academic Achievements
• Secured All India Rank 24 in JEE Advanced 2015 out of 150,000 students
• Received IIT Bombay’s Institute Academic Prize twice, for 2015-16 and 2017-18
• Awarded Student Travel Grant by IEEE to attend IEEE Security & Privacy Symposium 2017
• Awarded Student Travel Grant by ACM to attend PLMW and PLDI 2018
• Awarded ICNP Student Travel Grant to present at P4 European Workshop, colocated with IEEE ICNP 2018
• Awarded the Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana (KVPY) Fellowship by Govt. of India
• Awarded the National Talent Search Scholarship by NCERT

Open Source Contributions

• OWASP ZeroDay Cyber Research Shellcoder | Open Web Application Security Project
{ Implemented a new OSX x86 shellcode module using assembly programming for penetration testing
{ Successfully demoed at DEFCON Labs 2016 and BlackHat EU

• SymEngine | Fastest symbolic manipulation library written in C++

{ Implemented a new Infinity class in C++ to handle calculations which could lead to infinitely large values
{ Added new functions for manipulations of symbolic polynomials and trigonometric functions

Key Projects
• Indexing Schemes for Data Recording Systems (Aug ’17 – Nov’17)
{ Hacked postgres internals for implementing a new index to support large continuous stream of incoming data
and store it in a manner suitable for future access
{ Implemented stratergies for incremental organization of B+ trees in memory and on disk to support both insertion
and queries with reasonable efficiency, and without the delays of periodic batch processing
{ Implemented the stepped-merge algorithm paper in C language for merging B+ trees on disk for faster
queries

• Real-time Chat Application (Apr ’17 – May ’17)

{ Built a multithreaded chat server using Linux socket programming in C and C++, with LDAP login support
{ Implemented secure salted password hashing with Argon2i algorithm for storing passwords in database
{ Built an Android and command-line client application with features like group chat, friend requests and last seen

• SpamSlam - Spam prevention using Blockchain | Hack InOut 4.0 Winner (Oct ’17 – Oct ’17)
{ Used Gnosis’ Ethereum based javascript APIs to create mini prediction markets for emails, using a Django backend
{ Used Machine Learning techniques to create an approximate oracle for the prediction market

• Malware Classifier (Apr ’17 – May’17)

{ Trained machine learning models in python with 400 GB data from Microsoft to classify malware samples
{ Extracted n-gram frequency, segment size, pixel intensity as features from malware binary and assembly
{ Used gradient boosting and filtering based on random forest feature importance score for better results

• Smashing the Stack (Apr ’17 – May’17)

{ Demonstrated techniques like ret2libc attack and NOP spray for exploiting buffer overflows, bypassing Data
Execution Prevention (DEP) and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) mitigations
{ Demonstrated format string exploits to get arbitrary memory reads and writes

• Safe Reinforcement Learning in Pacman (Sep ’18 – Nov ’18)

{ Learnt about safe RL using shields built by combining safety specifications written in Linear Temporal Logic and
the environment represented as a Markov Decision Process
{ Implemented a simpler shield for pacman environment, evaluated it on six different metrics and made inferences
about the usefulness and performance overheads of using the shield

2/3
• Compiler for a C-like language (Jan ’18 – May ’18)
{ Developed a compiler for a C-like language in python, for MIPS instruction set architecture
{ Supported major functionalities like function calls, if-else statements, loops and arithmetic expressions

• Understanding internals of the InterPlanetary File System (Oct ’18 – Nov ’18)
{ Studied about the working of distributed hash tables (S/Kademlia, Coral), git internals, self-certified file systems
(SFS), P2P protocols, merkle DAGs and how IPFS builds upon those ideas to create a P2P distributed file system
{ Gave a presentation explaining IPFS components and demoed the core features [Link]

• 3D Graphical Modelling and Animation (Jul ’17 – Nov ’17)

{ Implemented hierarchical models of 3D toys using C++ OpenGL and texture mapped for surface detail
{ Simulated a spotlight and general direction lights and used shading algorithms for lighting and shadows
{ Generated an animation video by recording keyframes and interpolating them

• LendIt - Book lending website | Hack InOut 3.0 Finalist - NIT Surat (Aug ’16 – Aug’16)
{ Implemented a backend using python Django for the Lendit website, which allows user interaction, sending
notifications, searching and lending books, maintaining a user profile among other features
{ Got selected among the top 7 (out of 50) development projects and went through to the final round

Technical Achievements
st
•1 position in InOut Hackathon Blockchain Track 2017, Bangalore and Ubisoft GameJam 2017, Pune
• Runner Up in Yahoo! Japan HackU 2017
• 2nd Runner Up in Microsoft code.fun.do Hackathon 2016 and Kandy Sugar Hackathon 2016
• 1st position in XLR8 2015 for making a remote controlled obstacle crossing robot
• 6th position among 1028 teams worldwide in Seccon CTF 2017
• Semifinalist of business track in Eureka! 2017, Asia’s largest Business Model Competition
• Received Hostel Technical Color Award 2017-18
• Conducted a 4-hour hands-on workshop in freshman year on Arduino programming for 50+ students
• Audited and found vulnerabilities in IIT Bombay TA portal and WnCC internship portal

Public Speaking and Blogging

• Gave talks on Introduction to Cybersecurity, Social Engineering and CTFs at IIT Bombay [Speakerdeck]
• Took sessions on Sandbox breakout and Format-string attacks at UC Santa Barbara
• Write blog posts about computer security, programming and write-ups for CTF challenges
• Make youtube videos explaining and demoing various binary exploitation techniques

Programming Skills
C/C++, Python, Bash, x86 assembly, MIPS assembly, SQL, Java, Javascript, Django, jQuery, Docker, kubernetes,
Vagrant, OpenGL, LATEX, Arduino, MATLAB, Git

Positions of Responsibility
• Founder & Manager | CSE Cybersecurity Club - IIT Bombay (Nov ’16 – Present)
• Teaching Assistant | Data Structures and Algorithms - IIT Bombay (Jul ’18 – Present)
• Web Convener | Student Technical Activities Body - IIT Bombay (May ’16 – May ’17)
• Volunteer | Web and Coding Club - IIT Bombay (May ’16 – May ’17)