Nimal Kurien Thomas Software Engineering & Security

Software engineer building backend services, cloud infrastructure and ML pipelines, mostly in Python and Go. I secure what I build, which is a large part of why it holds up.

Two CVEs, two IEEE papers, and an MEng in Cybersecurity at the University of Maryland.

Based in College Park, Maryland.

Certifications

OffSec Certified Professional+ (OSCP+) OSCP+ OffSec Certified Professional (OSCP) OSCP HTB Certified Offensive AI Expert (HTB COAE) HTB COAE AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Associate AWS SAA CompTIA Security+ ce Certification Security+
Security Evaluation Intern Brightsight by SGS, Delft, Netherlands
  • Built an end-to-end motion side-channel attack recovering the PIN entered in a sample app from the phone’s own haptic feedback, since each keypress vibration perturbs the accelerometer and gyroscope, sensors readable without any app-granted permission.
  • Injected a Frida gadget into the live app process to timestamp every tap and collected motion traces in the background through a buffered SensorEventListener service, labelling the sensor window just before and after each press to build precisely aligned per-digit datasets.
  • Benchmarked logistic regression, decision tree, random forest, and SVM in MLflow, with random forest performing best at ~70% per digit on per-device models, and shipped the capture, training, and inference workflow as a Flask tool.
  • Ran static and dynamic analysis on mobile payment applications, mapping findings to MPoC software protection requirements.
  • Explored secure boot and mobile sandboxing outside evaluation work: attempted to reproduce a public iOS sandbox escape abusing the itunesstored and bookassetd daemons to write files into restricted /private/var paths, and traced a published Samsung Galaxy A boot chain running from a Little Kernel JPEG heap overflow to a full secure boot bypass with TEE key extraction.
Aug 2025 - Dec 2025
Teaching Assistant University of Maryland, College Park
  • Supported students through office hours and guidance on coursework.
  • Graded assignments and exams.
Jan 2026 - Present
Software Engineer, Project Management Office (Fortive account) Capgemini, Bengaluru
  • Drove Agile/Scrum delivery for a global industrial client across Azure-based workstreams, facilitating sprint planning, standups, and retrospectives.
  • Tracked releases and dependencies to keep program management, engineering, and offshore teams aligned on scope and timelines, owning Supply Chain domain releases.
  • Managed L1/L2 escalation and release-tracking workflows, driving triage of production issues between support and engineering through to resolution.
  • Supported a client audit by coordinating and compiling required documentation and evidence across teams to meet auditor deadlines.
Apr 2023 - Jul 2024
Industry Training Program, Rapid Labs Tata Consultancy Services, Bengaluru
  • Built a VADER-based sentiment analysis module in an NLP pipeline covering tokenization, stop-word removal, stemming, then lexicon scoring.
  • Used Apache Spark for data cleaning and preprocessing, and tuned the classifier against curated datasets to improve reliability.
Apr 2022 - Jun 2022
Software Engineering Intern Capital Quant Solutions, Bengaluru
  • Wrote Python scripts to parse PDFs and extract and analyze data from documents.
  • Automated a manual document-processing workflow.
Feb 2021 - Apr 2021
Master of Engineering, Cybersecurity University of Maryland, College Park

GPA 3.8 / 4.0. Selected coursework:

Multimodal Foundation Models Cloud Security ML Techniques Applied to Cybersecurity Penetration Testing Hacking of C Programs and Unix Binaries Digital Forensics
Expected Dec 2026
Bachelor of Engineering, Computer Science Visvesvaraya Technological University, Bengaluru

GPA 8.8 / 10.

2018 - 2022
CVE-2026-42352 ↗ Server-side request forgery pygeoapi · CWE-918 · CVSS 8.6 High · fixed in 0.23.3

Process execution requests to the OGC API accept a subscriber object, and the server calls the URLs it is given. An unauthenticated caller can point those callbacks at internal HTTP services reachable only from the server.

CVE-2026-42351 ↗ Path traversal pygeoapi · CWE-22 · CVSS 7.5 High · fixed in 0.23.3

The STAC FileSystemProvider resolves requested paths without confining them to the configured data directory, so traversal sequences walk outside it. Without protective middleware in front, that discloses directory contents to an unauthenticated user.

Skin Lesion Classification using CNN IEEE · DOI 10.1109/ICICT54344.2022.9850506 ↗

A CNN-based web application reaching 90% accuracy on the ISIC dataset for melanoma, nevus, and seborrheic keratosis classification.

Skin Cancer Detection using Deep Learning IEEE · DOI 10.1109/ICEARS53579.2022.9751826 ↗

A CNN model reaching 88% accuracy classifying skin lesions from the ISIC dataset.

Work

Cloud & Infrastructure

AWS environments built as code, from deployable reference architectures to hardened baselines and the audits behind them.

ML / AI

Models and the pipelines around them, trained, tracked and served rather than left in a notebook.

Pentesting

Full-chain offensive engagements, written up from initial access to objective.

Further engagement reports are not published here.

Platform & DevOps

Deployment pipelines and Kubernetes platforms, with the release gates, signing and rollbacks that keep them honest.

Binary Exploitation

Memory corruption from the ground up, and turning crashes into control.

DFIR

Reconstructing what happened, how, and when, from the logs left behind.

API & AI Security

Securing the interfaces AI systems expose, and the protocols they speak.

The fastest way to reach me is email. Either address works.

nimalkt@gmail.com nthoma14@umd.edu