Hello, and welcome to my website. I’m Simran. I currently work as an IT Security Analyst at cnlab security AG in Rapperswil, Switzerland. Before this job, I completed a PhD in Mathematics at the University of Zurich, where I worked in the field of applied algebra. My research focused on public-key cryptographic protocol constructions based on problems in algebra that are proposed for use as post-quantum one-way functions.
The research was supported in part by the Cyber Defence Campus, which also gave me exposure to broader aspects of cybersecurity beyond my immediate research. (Here’s an interview with them with a bit more about my research.)
Being trained as a mathematician and not a computer scientist, I try to make a conscious effort to build the foundations of knowledge I may have missed out on. Over the past year and a half, I am starting to appreciate how vast and layered the field of security actually is, and how much it rests on a thorough, deep understanding of systems, networks, applications, and more.
I built this site to document the things I learn and work on in my free time — concepts, explanations, code, etc. I find writing a useful way to understand, formalize, structure, and track theory and ideas. It also sometimes surfaces questions that may be otherwise missed.
This website
I built this website using the static site generator Hugo, starting with the Texify3 theme for its LaTeX support, and gradually customizing the layout and styles. There were two reasons I wanted to build it myself. First, to have a single place to collect my writing, research, and ongoing projects, with the freedom to shape the layout without restrictions.
Second, since much of my work involves security testing web applications, I wanted a small, structured way to start exploring how they work under the hood. A static site is the simplest kind of web application, and this felt like a good place to start. At some point, I’d like to add more complexity and perhaps even test the security of what I build. The site (content, structure, and styling) is still a work in progress.