I'm in my fourth year of studying Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I also studied abroad at Denmark Technical University, outside Copenhagen, Denmark, during the Spring 2014 semester.
Born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, I had a great education throughout high school.
In May of 2012, I graduated from Naperville North High School. I had a great experience in high school, including some exposure to programming. In 10th grade, I first started programming through school in Python. I went on to learn Java in 12th grade.
The following August, I started college at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying Computer Engineering with a minor in Business.
From January to May 2014, I spent a semester at Denmark Technical University in Copenhagen, Denmark. I took classes like Cryptology 1 and Data Compression, and made a lot of new international friends.
I'm going into my senior year of college. The real world has never seemed so close.
For many years prior to college, I was set on working in IT for the rest of my life. As I started doing a part-time campus IT job, I realized I wanted something more. From freshman year forward, I wasn't quite sure what I was interested in, besides knowing that I wanted to do "something with software." But, let's face it, who doesn't want to do that right now?
Then I took the Cryptology 1 course during my semester in Denmark, and that's when things started coming together. With all the security and privacy revelations of the past couple years, and my (limited) IT experience, I realized computer/network security could be the right field for me. Going forward, I hope to learn more about applied cryptography (especially elliptic-curve based systems) and new authentication techniques.
I only really recently became interested in cyber security. Previously I was always on the other side of it: I was fixing people's computers that had malware on it. As I became more curious about computers in general, I always had a particular cuiousity towards how malware is made and how it exploits computers. It's when I took the Cryptology 1 course in Denmark that my interest became a little more solidified, and it really took hold after completing Computer Security Lab at UIUC.
In general, security is a fun, and for better or for worse, a very relevant field to be in right now. Of course, security is one of those fields that is perpetually relevant, but given everything that has occurred since July 2013, cyber security is particularly important today.
I particularly enjoy the cryptography field within cyber security. Of course, I'm no mathematician and as such, cannot call myself a cryptographer. I would, however, call myself a software developer, so applied cryptography like SSL/TLS is what really interests me going forward.
Down the line, I hope to somehow get involved with educating both end users and developers alike about security and why its important, and its role relative to their privacy. I personally believe that all software developrs have a responsibility to their customers to design their code with security in mind from the start, and that we should all strive to provide the best level of security we can to our users.
This past summer, I completed a Technology Development Internship with Capital One in downtown Chicago. I was mostly working with AngularJS for a responsive web app, but I also worked with NodeJS and JSON Web Tokens.
I was the IT Intern at the City of Naperville municipal government. I assisted end users and became more familiar with sys admin tools by shadowing network admins.
From August 2012 to Decemeber 2014, I worked as a student technician/consultant within CITES (Campus IT). I started by taking tickets with clients that lived near the University, and went on to becoming attached to departments in the University and working with them on site.
My first job was at a small computer repair shop in my hometown, Naperville, IL. I started as an intern the summer after my junior year of high school, and went on to work there on the weekends during senior year.
This entire class was focused on learning data structures Object Oriented Programming in C++. We learned about all sorts of trees, hash tables, graphs and more - and looked at their features like insertion and access runtimes, dimension limits, etc.
The main chunk of this class was creating a basic operating system in a team. We created a simple kernel that boots up the system with a small set of drivers, and hooked up interrupt handlers for those devices, like the keyboard and display.
While there are multiple computer security classes at UIUC, this one is particularly fun because it's very hands-on. Most of the learning happens in learning about vulnerabilities and exploits and applying them in labs. Of course, we still had to learn about the underlying concepts like buffer overflows and the OSI model to understand why these exploits occur, but the labs were the focus.
As I mentioned, I took this class abroad. We focused on learning about four main things and how they all work: block ciphers like AES and DES, public key cryptosystems like RSA and ElGamal, digital signature systems like RSA and DSA, and cryptographic hash functions like MD5 and the SHA family. Unfortunatley, since it was considered an introductory class, we did not go into elliptic curve based systems.
This was the other main class I took abroad. we learned about how various compression algorithms work. In general, all compression follows a few similar steps like quantization and differential or arithmetic encoding. With that basic outline in mind, we delved deeper into popular algoritms like JPEG, and learned how it uses the discrete cosine transform (DCT) for quantization and encoding.
Most of my involvement at UIUC outside of classes has been through the IEEE student branch on campus, which I've been a part of since my sophomore year. I started out on the IT committee where I learned some basic web development skills, and in my junior year I went on become the IT director/webmaster. The big project we undertook was a desperately needed complete overhaul of the website. In the process, I pushed for more usage of GitHub, which now stores our website code.
For my senior year, I am the Technical VP for the student branch. This means I oversee the Technical Branch, which contains the Projects and Workshops committees, along with our JSDC Robotics team and webmaster. Further, I oversee the development of Technical Advancement Groups.
In the Fall 2014 semester, I was an Engineering 100 Learning Assistant. All incoming freshmen are required to take a 4 week class to help them get situated with university life. I had 23 ECE freshmen to mentor. I showed them various academic and professional resources in the ECE department, Engineering college, and University at large, and answered their questions to help them through their first few weeks.
ECE Pulse is a student-run technical conference in the ECE department at UIUC. This year, I am the Workshops director, so I'll be helping to organize technical workshops for the conference with some companies and other student organizations.
For my Data Compression final project in Denmark, I applied the Lempel-Ziv-Welch universal lossless compression algorithm to bitmap (BMP) images, text, and general binary files in C++. I then analyzed the results' compression ratios, runtime memory usage, and image quality.
This was done as a learning experience more than anything else. As such, it shouldn't be considered as anything viable.
For CS 460, UIUC's Computer Security Lab course, I and three others attempted creating a very barebones version of SSL cryptographic algorithms in the (relatively) new programming language Rust.
Unfortunately we only got around to creating AES256, HMAC-SHA256, and Diffie-Hellman. Rust itself stabilized to version 1.0 at the end of our project, and it was a very new and very different language to all of us. It was a great learning experience for all of us though.
This was one of the first side projects I really did, and it was certainly my first exposure to the wacky world of JavaScript and JSON. This Chrome Extension was a way to view how many lab computers were available eat each UIUC Engineering Work Stations lab, based on readily available JSON data from EWS.
If you'd like to get in touch with me, the best way is email: anitgandhi@gmail.com