Nakul Bajaj

I am a full-time software engineer at Censys, completing my undergraduate degree part-time at the University of Michigan. I also participate in election security research under the direction of Professor Alex Halderman. In my free time, I enjoy spending time with family and driving on road trips.

Software Engineer at Censys

I'm currently working on the data team at Censys, writing Go code to scan and store metadata about IPv4 and IPv6 hosts with open ports on the Internet. I have also had the opportunity to work on the Certificates v2 dataset. (Currently in beta here!) This data powers the Censys search frontend, BigQuery tables for enterprise and researchers, and the ASM product.

Election Security Research

I began working in the election security field before my senior year of high school, when I had the chance to work on a security usability paper that earned the Best Student Paper Award at IEEE Security and Privacy 2020. Additionally, I have been fortunate to work with Kevin Chang to speak at DEF CON 27 in regards to voter files and voter registration security. There, I was also part of the Voting Machine Hacking Village, where I worked with my colleague, Henry Meng, and Oregon State undergraduates to discover vulnerabilities in the Dominion ImageCast Precinct ballot tabulator. More recently, I co-authored a paper on the efficacy of logic and accuracy (L&A) testing across the United States.

Undergraduate at University of Michigan

During my undergrad, I was able to take some interesting courses. I've highlighted a few here along with some group projects completed for those classes.

Computer Security: used Ghidra and ROP chaining to write buffer overflow attacks
Operating Systems: wrote a custom library in C++ to emulate basic functionalities of the thread, mutex, and condition variable classes
Computer Networks: built a simplified HTTP Live Streaming proxy and DNS name server with round robin and geographical load balancing options
Election Cybersecurity: wrote a paper analyzing election machines connected to the Internet found via Censys, Shodan, and other OSINT tools

Contact: nbajaj < < at > > umich < < dot > > edu