Hi, I’m Ryan

I’m a graduate Computer Science student at the University of Oregon currently working to build a teaching SOC where students can learn cybersecurity skills. I also do research for the Center for Cyber Security and Privacy (CCSP) in the Network & Security (NETSEC) Research Lab.

I got my start in cybersecurity doing bug bounties in high school, where I made enough money to put myself through college. Even now, awards and grants I’ve received over the years support my graduate education. I’m proud to participate in the Google Bug Hunters Program, which has led the industry in supporting independent security researchers for many years. View some of my publicly-disclosed reports here. A write-up of my highest-severity bug is available here.

Skills & Research Interests

I’m primarily interested in web app exploitation and API abuse risks. Most of my personal research uses tools like Burp Suite and Wireshark. For programming tasks, Python has been my chosen language for almost a decade. I’m also competent in C(++) and have recently been learning Swift.

Professionally, I use SentinelOne Singularity for endpoint monitoring, OpenVAS for vulnerability management, and MISP for threat intelligence sharing. I have experience deploying open source and private security tools using Docker and Nginx. For ticketing systems, I’m familiar with Jira and TeamDynamix.

Projects

Teaching Security Operations Center

The Teaching Security Operations Center (TSOC) at the University of Oregon immerses students in a real-world, fully operational SOC, where they rotate through critical roles and gain practical expertise in defending against today’s evolving cyber threats. Since summer 2025, I’ve worked with the lead engineer to build out the TSOC’s internal infrastructure, deploying popular open-source threat intelligence and vulnerability management tools for our clients. Currently, I’m building an internal search tool that combines information from many popular OSINT data sources to glean the full picture on IoCs that we observe.

ReDNS

Today, the majority of DNS traffic remains unencrypted. Existing encrypted DNS protocols, such as DNS-over-HTTPS and DNSCrypt, suffer from prohibitive overhead and implementation complexity, resulting in critically low adoption despite major players (Google, Cloudflare, etc.) leading the charge. At the CCSP & NETSEC lab, we are leveraging an emerging form of elliptic curve cryptography to develop a lightweight, deployable encrypted DNS protocol. This project will culminate in my Master’s thesis, expected spring 2026.

LLM-Powered Search for Poetry Datasets

Two of the largest open collections of poetry on the Internet, Poets.org and the Poetry Foundation, utilize only keyword-based search for exact-text matching. This isn’t conducive to the work of literary researchers, who often visit to discover works they’ve never read before but which exhibit particular forms or techniques of interest to them. The goal of my undergraduate thesis for the Robert D. Clark Honors College was to explore whether large language models could identify abstract features of text at search-time to better support literary research projects. Available at the UO Scholars’ Bank.

Contact Me

To get in touch, you’re welcome to reach out to my first initial + my last name @ the domain for my university. I look forward to working with you.