whoami
Hello! My name is Aarav. This is the reboot of my website (formerly hosted on aaravbal.su – which was an amazing coincidence that I capitalized on immediately once I entered the ‘Soviet paraphernalia’ phase of my early-twenties).
I work as a security engineer, specifically in the offensive security testing space. I strive to get better at it, which is why I wanted to restart this blog and document my learnings. I have the most experience in web application security testing, but I’ve also done my fair share of cloud penetration tests. The latter is what I’m most interested in presently, because a lot of frontier technology companies (see below) are likely to be cloud-native customers. Industrial espionage is no longer just the domain of states attempting to catch up in key critical technologies, but also of the private sector (Does anyone else feel like we’re just a few steps away from megacorp-hired netrunners a la Snow Crash?). To this end, I practice and learn using the following resources:
- Pwned Labs is the best resource I’ve found to practice offensive cloud security skills.
- My friends Lizzie and Mitchell are excellent researchers and I learn a lot from them whenever we chat.
- fwd:cloudsec is a great resource for learning about cloud security.
- tl;dr cybersec is fantastic to keep up to date with overall cybersecurity developments. I pay particular attention to the cloudsec updates.
I’m interested in frontier technologies which seem to creep up around us (think seaweed farming, synthetic biology, orbital manufacturing, etc. not artificial intelligence and nuclear fusion). Not that the latter aren’t interesting, but I prefer the more grounded intermediate future technologies that are just around the corner and which have a very real chance of becoming subconsciously integrated into our daily lives. I think this stemmed from my early interests in science fiction (Ender’s Game, Starship Troopers) and slice of life (Malgudi Schooldays by RK Narayan and English August by Upamanyu Chatterjee; Gaunt’s Ghosts is good too although a bit more action-packed) stories.
I like the builder culture here in America, and in a macro sense am strongly supportive of and intrigued by the American Dynamism portfolio companies. I’m also excited by indigenous defense technology production in India, particularly as it relates to our engagement with the PRC in our Himalayan and northeastern borderlands, as well as in the broader Indo-Pacific region (INDUS-X is an interesting outgrowth of Indian and American policies dovetailing because of the latter). Finally, I keep an eye on Africa as well, for their developmental path mirrors India’s in quite a few ways, especially when it comes to leapfrogging technology (such as M-Pesa in Kenya).
I’m a fifth-culture kid: My genestock is rooted in the villages where my parents are from in the Krishna-Godavari deltaic plain of coastal Andhra Pradesh, in India’s southeast. I was born in New Delhi, and moved after a year to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, where I grew up. I came to the United States for my Bachelor’s degree in 2013, and have stuck around since.
I consider English my lingua franca, but I’m also conversationally fluent in Hindi and Telugu. I can read and write Hindi, Arabic, and Cyrillic. I cannot speak the last two (except phonetically).
I’m trying to write more, and I hope to keep the cadence of this blog relatively rapid.
I live in Seattle, which is the polar opposite of the environment I grew up in. I just moved here in early 2024, and I tremendously enjoy the biodiversity of the Pacific Northwest (thanks for the Olympic National Forest Messrs. Roosevelt and Muir!). I’m a proud member of the Puget Sound Mycological Society.
Find me online:
- GitHub
- Goodreads
- I also lurk and occassionally comment on Hacker News
Contact