I break AI systems to understand them,
and build what defends them._
- Founding engineer (employee #1) at a deep-tech startup, shipped and secured the full product.
- Patent IN584433, a smart pen for handwriting, in pilot across 5 schools.
- SANS NetWars Tournament Core Champion, 1st place, and GIAC GFACT at the 99th percentile.
- 29+ production vulnerabilities reported (5 critical), and a $25,000 SANS Paller scholarship.
- Building ARES, AUTOFORGE, REFUSAL-CLIMB, TAINT in AI security and safety.
now: red-teaming and the security of AI agents, plus the tooling that defends them.
research interests
ai security & safetyAI security and adversarial robustness — LLM red-teaming, automated jailbreak discovery, prompt and indirect-prompt injection, and agent / tool-use security.
AI security evaluations and benchmarks — building realistic evaluations and adaptive attacks that test whether safety measures actually hold, and auditing the benchmarks themselves for validity.
Securing the systems AI runs on — model and agent security across the software, infrastructure, and ML stack. I bring an offensive-security practitioner's mindset, and a habit of shipping open-source security tools, to empirical AI safety.
experience
building & securing real systems- Founded an AI-powered cybersecurity venture delivering black-box and white-box penetration testing for enterprises and startups, run by an agent harness (ARES) rather than by hand.
- "Claude Code for security teams": structured, methodology-driven testing that follows real attacker playbooks through the agent harness, instead of the ad-hoc, false-positive-heavy output of general-purpose coding agents.
- Built the Google Cloud image-processing and ML pipeline (Gemini) for IMU-sensor handwriting analysis, and shipped and secured the full product (web app, REST API, PostgreSQL) with JWT / Google-OAuth auth, rate limiting, and CI/CD.
- Threat-modeled the platform and reverse-engineered its BLE / NFC / SPI firmware in Ghidra, finding hardcoded credentials across 2 shipping variants and driving CVSS-based triage to remediation.
- Took the product through a 5-school, 500+ student pilot; co-filed Patent IN584433 and helped secure a $24,000 (INR 20 lakh) grant.
research projects
ai security & safetyAn agent loop for autonomous red-teaming: it plans and chains security tools through an MCP-style registry, carries persistent memory across engagements, and gates every finding behind human review. Targets web / API / infrastructure and LLM / agent surfaces.
aresredteam.comAn autonomous red-teaming system (researcher, attacker, autograder, novelty archive) that discovers LLM jailbreak strategies without hand-written payloads, clusters them into an attack taxonomy, and tests each class against paraphrase and classifier defenses. Open source, responsible disclosure.
github.com/VISHNU0906/autoforgeA defense that catches prompt-injection attacks on AI agents, where hidden text in a web page, file, or tool output tricks the agent into following the attacker instead of the user. On a labeled benchmark, the strongest method cut successful injections by 82.6% while wrongly flagging only 4.3% of clean responses, then blocks the high-risk ones.
github.com/VISHNU0906/taintUses a model's refusal direction and strength (open-weight activations) as a continuous search signal to map the refusal boundary and surface new jailbreak classes, then tests their transfer to closed models and survival against defenses.
github.com/VISHNU0906/refusal-climbA deliberately vulnerable LLM app and an attack framework spanning the OWASP LLM and API Top 10, scoring each exploit to SARIF, paired with a hardened build that closes every class and tests asserting each attack succeeds insecure and fails hardened.
github.com/VISHNU0906/mirageengineering
security tooling i have builtA CI/CD security gate that merges many scanners into one clean report, fails builds only on net-new findings, and uses an LLM to cut false positives.
github.com/VISHNU0906/gatekeeperA vulnerable AWS range, an attack chain that walks IAM privilege escalation up to admin, and a read-only auditor that maps every path back to a fix.
github.com/VISHNU0906/cloudrangeTurn security signals into metrics, SLOs, and dashboards, and collapse alert storms into root-cause incidents (cut a 53-alert storm down to 3 in testing). Plus an MCP injection scanner, a prompt-injection scanner, and an agent SSRF lab.
github.com/VISHNU0906patent
IN584433 · govt. of indiaAn IMU-sensor pen that digitizes handwriting.
Co-invented a granted national patent for an intelligent IMU-sensor pen that digitizes handwriting in real time. I developed the deep-learning recognition model (CNN + Bi-LSTM) that converts pen motion into multilingual text at around 82% character-level accuracy, collected and curated the dataset, and reduced sensor noise and drift with Kalman filtering and Dynamic Time Warping. Assisted the hardware team with device testing. In pilot at 5 schools.

competitions
Core Champion.
1st place. 2026.
achievements & awards
education
certifications
positions of responsibility
- Founded and lead the university's offensive-security community, growing it to 200+ members and making it the campus hub for hands-on security.
- Run 3 inter-college CTF competitions and 5+ industry-expert workshops each year, and built a peer-mentorship program that has trained 50+ students.
Fellowships & programs: Y Combinator Startup School (India cohort, 2026, selected from 20,000+ applicants) · 1752 Ventures Accelerator (mentorship for ARES and Zenith) · Founder Inc. alumnus (Canopy, 2025) · McKinsey Forward Program (2025).
book a call
15 minutes · cal.comInto AI security, red-teaming, or building safe AI systems? Grab a slot, or email kvr.vishnu23@gmail.com.
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