Team bi0s from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri campus, participated in Troopers 19 Conference, held at Germany from March 18-22, 2019.

Troopers, a prestigious IT-Security Conference, is conducted annually by ERNW at Heidelberg, Germany. Team bi0s utilized the international stage to showcase some of the country’s best brains in the field of cyber-security. Five student representatives, from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri campus, attended the conference.

Siddharth Muralee, from Semster 6 of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri campus, gave a talk on ‘Evolution of Kernel Fuzzers in NetBSD’. The talk shed light on advanced fuzzing techniques such as evolutionary fuzzing using code coverage and fuzzing aides like sanitizers. He delved into the fuzzing setup in the NetBSD kernel and the unique techniques that were implemented for a variety of kernel subsystems.

Student scholarship winners Vishnu Dev T. J. ( S4), Akul Pillai (S4), S. Ashwin Shenoi (S4), Aswin M. Guptha (S8) were honored at the conference too. The scholarship were awarded to these students as they distinguished themselves from their peers by applying their theoretical knowledge to solve a set of real-world security challenges. One challenge was based on Timing Attack on Password validation, with the objective to access the admin portal. Another challenge required the team to exploit a lesser known bug in PHP. Amrita is proud to announce that the students emerged cream of the crop among 300 attendees included professionals, security researchers, and students.

The team added a feather in their cap by clinching the annual PacketWars contest; an annual battle conducted for players to think practically about and conceptualize solutions to existing security problems in the world under time constraints.