Looking Back and Looking Forward: My Undergrad Journey

Admission to RGUKT

Education should be: free, universal, digital, and accessible to all regardless of background - balajis

I really hope the above quote becomes true in India in the future.

RGUKT was established with the motive to provide free technology-oriented higher education to students born into a low-income, rural family in AP. It was Dr. Raj Reddy's idea who is a professor at CMU to provide free laptops, internet and have a curriculum that encourages self-learning. So, sometime around 2014 when I am in 10th standard studying in a government high school one of the lecturers somehow predicted I would top the class and suggested me to apply for this university. These government high schools I studied are bullshit, most of the people send their kids to private schools which are better but the issue is everyone can't afford them.

As my lecturer predicted, I am topper of the class and I applied to the university and got admission to 6 years integrated program(2+4). Honestly, at that time I really didn't have a clue about what I applied for and I know it was engineering but I don't know what engineering actually was. The reason for my cluelessness is that nobody told me about this stuff in high school and my parents didn't receive any formal education 

I joined the university on Aug 1, 2015, interestingly I still remembered the date. It was the first time I stayed away from home and I saw a lot of people feeling homesick and I didn't feel a bit maybe it's because I was too excited.

I went to an introductory class and man that was one fancy classroom with a laptop and a LAN at every seat, projector, and a hub. For an inquisitive guy like me who never used a smartphone or a computer, there was a lot of stuff to poke in that classroom. 

I remembered sitting at the seat near a window, exploring that windows/zorin(linux) Acer laptop, and somehow I was able to configure intranet IP to access the online notice board, I still don't know how I did it.

Pre University Course 1st and 2nd year

The first two years of the integrated undergraduate are pre-university course which is similar to 12th/Intermediate. Most of the course content is online hosted on the intranet in a lousy website, so the seniors shared the offline websites they have created with fancy CSS and HTML. My immediate thought was to create one, so I somehow managed to edit the HTML file and changed "Desgined by someguy" to "Designed by s1r1us", changed a few colors here and there, and shared the website with my friends. They were all so surprised, little did they know that I edited a few HTML files on the senior's website.  Over time, I got interested in web development and I developed a website for administration and a chat rooms website in the classroom which got me into trouble because few of my friends used it to slide into girls' DMs.

At that time, we used to have night classes and we saw our seniors playing Counter-Strike 1.6  a lot, so we somehow managed to get it in our laptops and it is the only thing we did during the night classes. 

Weekends were particularly allocated to cricket, they were the only days we wake up in the early morning at 5:30 AM to get hold of the cricket ground to play matches with other classes or seniors, if you are a few minutes late to the ground it will be occupied by the other class teams.

Hacking in PUC

I used to do some lame stuff, like controlling others' laptops via SSH or RDP, and brag that I am hacking their laptops. Almost, every laptop in the classroom runs on Linux OS called Zorin, only a few were installed with ssh server, so during lunchtime, I used to stay in the classroom and login into my friend's laptop using default credentials and install OpenSSH(sudo apt install openssh-server)and rebooting(sudo reboot) their laptop was so much fun whenever they were watching some movie seriously. 

It looked pretty exciting to me, so I decided to visit hostels of computer science seniors who do "hacking" and learn stuff from them. So, I met a guy named Subhani he taught me some cool stuff like sniffing internet proxy passwords(most of the infra runs on HTTP) on the intranet, and shared sites like https://www.hackthissite.org/ to learn.

At that time, I was mostly doing script kiddie stuff and making lame youtube videos like the below one and I didn't know anything about CTFs. If I could change one thing at that time, that would definitely be knowing about CTFs because the next two years I spent my free time learning about AI/ML which in my opinion could've been used for doing CTFs.

Overall, PUC went pretty well with lots of memories to cherish and good grades. 

I was fascinated by electronics and computers, so I had only two choices in my mind one is Computer Science and another one is Electronics, after careful thought I decided to choose Computer Science and Engineering as my field of study for Engineering.

Engineering 1st and 2nd year

During the whole engineering, I never concentrated much on academics because most of the faculty were not good at what they were teaching and I have confidence that I can learn alone without a teacher through the Internet or books. So, I concentrated mostly on exploring things outside the curriculum like developing websites or doing competitive programming(boring/hard) or doing free AI courses on Coursera/Edx during these two years. I founded AI/ML club in the university but didn't get much traction. I am doing online courses about ML, but I am not practically developing anything new or interesting and it felt boring. 

It was also the time when I earned my first penny through my knowledge from Chegg. 

Start of CTFs - Team Invaders is born

It was sometime around November 2018 when I am in the second semester of my second year of engineering, a friend of mine shared a link to a hacking competition called InCTF where people from all over India will be invited to onsite finals if they qualified in the ongoing competition. That looked pretty dope, so we decided to form a team named Invaders with 5 members. 

IIRC, we got first place in the qualifiers and got an invitation to onsite finals. We split the categories in the competition to each of the members, I used to do Binary and Web Exploitation. And we practiced some old CTF challenges for the finals. 

We went to onsite finals on December 24th, 2018, nailed the finals, got first place and they rewarded us with ~$600 dollars.  

It was really an awesome experience. The adrenaline rush and the excitement of solving a CTF challenge got me addicted, and I know at that point I am going to pursue Information Security as a career.

I continued playing the CTFs the whole semester.

Engineering 3rd year

We participated in a lot of CTFs and reached to top 3 in India in the 2019 ctftime rankings. We got an invitation to the CSAW finals with free flight tickets, we got 3rd place there. I was one of the top 3 CTF players who got invited to BountyCon which is hosted by facebook in Singapore but sadly because of COVID it got canceled.

We(Invaders) conducted a local CTF in the university to find talent to hire in our team, we found a gem S3v3ru5 who turned out to be a pro in cryptography.