$ vishnu@kosuri
vishnu kosuri// ai security researcher · security engineerbangalore, india

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.

Vishnu Kosuri
vishnu_kosuri.jpg2026
IN584433
patent_granted
#1
sans_netwars_core
29+
production_vulns
99th
gfact_percentile
[01]

research interests

ai security & safety

AI 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.

[02]

experience

building & securing real systems
Mar — Jun 2026
Zenithfounder
  • 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.
Dec 2024 — Mar 2026
Vahini Technologiesfounding engineer · employee #1
  • 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.
2024 — 2026
CSAI Research and Development Cellresearch analyst
Industry-advisory research under Lt. Gen. (Dr) Rajesh Pant, India's former National Cyber Security Coordinator at the Prime Minister's Office; authored explainers on AI security, adversarial threats to AI systems, and emerging risks of frontier AI.
Jul — Oct 2025
Tapnex (NexGen FC)security consultant
Found 11 vulnerabilities, including an MFA bypass, reflected XSS, and IDOR-based privilege escalation, by auditing an NFC cashless event platform across its web, mobile, and API surfaces.
Jun — Aug 2024
ISAC — National Security Databasepenetration testing intern
Found 18 vulnerabilities (5 rated critical) across 2 commercial production sites with CVSS v3 scoring, reproduction steps, and remediation guidance.
[03]

research projects

ai security & safety
ARESred teaming

An 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.com
AUTOFORGEjailbreaks

An 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/autoforge
TAINTdefense

A 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/taint
REFUSAL-CLIMBinterpretability

Uses 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-climb
MIRAGEevaluations

A 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/mirage
[04]

engineering

security tooling i have built
gatekeeperappsec / ci-cd

A 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/gatekeeper
cloudrangecloud / aws

A 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/cloudrange
bastion & triagesre / incidents

Turn 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/VISHNU0906
[05]

patent

IN584433 · govt. of india
patent IN584433 · government of india · granted 2026 · first-named inventor

An 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.

IMU smart pen prototype
smart_pen.jpg — IMU sensor pen, exposed circuit
Patent IN584433, Government of India
[06]

competitions

SANS NetWars Tournament challenge coin
sans netwars tournament

Core Champion.

1st place. 2026.

SANS NetWars Core Champion. 1st place.
2026
OWASP AppSec Bangalore BeSec CTF. 1st place, web app security.
2025
SANS Veterans Day CTF. 6th place.
2026
SANS CSA Bangalore CTF. 4th place.
2025
[07]

achievements & awards

$25,000 SANS Paller scholarship. Funds the Applied Cybersecurity certificate at SANS Technology Institute.
2025
29+ production vulnerabilities disclosed across web, API, infrastructure, NFC, and IoT firmware (5 critical), via HackerOne, Bugcrowd, and direct disclosure.
2024–26
Open-source contributor. Merged pull requests to Django, FastAPI, Starlette, Celery, Scrapy, OWASP Nettacker, Impacket, Scapy.
ongoing
Patent IN584433 granted by the Government of India.
2026
[08]

education

B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering (Cyber Security)
Jain (Deemed-to-be) University, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Bangalore
2023 — 2027
Undergraduate Certificate in Applied Cybersecurity (ACS)
SANS Technology Institute (funded by the SANS Paller scholarship)
2025 — 2026
[09]

certifications

GIAC GFACT — Foundational Cybersecurity Technologies. SANS Institute (99th percentile).
2026
Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH v12). EC-Council.
2026
eLearnSecurity Junior Penetration Tester (eJPTv2). INE Security.
2026
GIAC GSEC — Security Essentials. SANS Institute.
2026
GIAC GCIH — Certified Incident Handler. SANS Institute.
in progress
[10]

positions of responsibility

2023 — Present
Salus Cybersecurity Club, Jain Universityfounder
  • 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.
2025 — 2026
AWS Cloud Captainjain university, fet
Selected by AWS to lead the campus cloud community; built it from scratch and ran 4 hands-on workshops for 150+ students on IAM, S3 misconfigurations, and cloud hardening.
2025 — 2026
Google Developer Groups On Campuscyber security facilitator
Selected as security lead for the campus GDG chapter; ran web-application-security and OWASP Top 10 sessions for the developer community.

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).

[11]

book a call

15 minutes · cal.com

Into AI security, red-teaming, or building safe AI systems? Grab a slot, or email kvr.vishnu23@gmail.com.

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