Rithvik Amaragani | Cybersecurity & Network Engineering

About Me

Cybersecurity student at Purdue University with hands-on experience in digital forensics, network engineering, security automation, secure application development, cloud security, and threat analysis. I enjoy building and securing systems, analyzing network traffic, reverse engineering software, and designing enterprise networks.

Education

Purdue University

Purdue Polytechnic Institute

B.S. Cybersecurity

West Lafayette, Indiana

August 2025 – Expected May 2028

Experience

Digital Forensics Intern

ManTech International

June 2025 – June 2026

Identified malware on IoT devices using ADB and analyzed its behavior to understand execution flow and device interactions; developed custom scripts to emulate authentication services and test device communications.
Reverse-engineered compiled binaries using Ghidra, GDB, and hex editors to trace execution, identify anomalies, and extract embedded data.
Developed Python scripts to decrypt and parse custom file formats and support cryptographic and cipher analysis; analyzed encrypted network traffic with Wireshark for forensic investigations.

Python Ghidra GDB ADB Wireshark Digital Forensics

Lead Network Developer

GMU HackFax

Nov 2023 – Nov 2025

Designed and tested 30 CTF-style networking challenges in Cisco Packet Tracer covering routing, switching, troubleshooting, and network configuration for nearly 100 competitors.
Led a development team and authored technical walkthroughs and solution guides supporting challenge deployment and competition operations at George Mason University.

Cisco Packet Tracer Cisco IOS Routing Switching CTF Development

Projects

Secure Web Application & Authentication Security Lab

Python Flask SQLAlchemy

September 2026

Engineered a secure Python/Flask authentication system implementing bcrypt password hashing, Flask-Login, role-based access control, CSRF protection, account lockout, IP rate limiting, hardened sessions/cookies, and SQLAlchemy ORM.
Validated application security through brute-force, authorization, CSRF, and SQL-injection testing.
Built a Python security-monitoring and threat-detection pipeline that parsed authentication logs, correlated usernames and source IPs, detected brute-force and multi-account attacks, assigned LOW/MEDIUM/HIGH risk scores, and surfaced high-severity events through an administrator dashboard.

Enterprise Network Design & Security Lab

Cisco Packet Tracer Cisco IOS OSPF HSRP

July 2026

Designed a high-availability enterprise network with VLAN segmentation, 802.1Q trunking, inter-VLAN routing, RSTP, LACP EtherChannel, HSRP, OSPF, and DHCP across internal and remote subnets.
Validated network redundancy, fault tolerance, and routing convergence through simulated uplink and EtherChannel failures.
Confirmed HSRP gateway failover, OSPF route recovery, EtherChannel resiliency, and end-to-end connectivity using Cisco IOS troubleshooting commands.

AWS T-Pot Honeypot & Threat Detection Lab

AWS EC2 T-Pot Kibana Suricata

June 2026

Deployed and configured an AWS EC2 T-Pot honeypot on Ubuntu, configuring AWS Security Group rules and honeypot services to collect live malicious traffic for network security monitoring and intrusion detection.
Investigated 72 attacks from 49 sources across 12 countries in Kibana.
Correlated source IP addresses, ASNs, geolocation, targeted ports, brute-force credentials, honeypot activity, and Suricata CVE detections to identify attacker behavior and indicators of compromise.

Leadership

Team Lead

CyberPatriot

Nov 2023 – Jan 2025

Led a 5-person team in Windows Server, Ubuntu Linux, and Cisco network hardening under timed competition conditions.
Ranked 1st in Virginia and 33rd out of 2,967 teams nationally.
Achieved an 8th out of 800 Cisco Packet Tracer finish.