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RCAC Student Spotlight: David Piedra

  • Science Highlights

Name: David Piedra

Year: Junior

Image description

Major: Cybersecurity

Position: Research Support Developer

Can you introduce yourself and share a little about who you are? Hello! My name is David and I’m a Research Support Developer!

What are some of your main interests or passions? Some of my interests include technology, camping, cars and food.

Can you tell us about your role at RCAC? What does your job entail? Research Support Developer. I have been maintaining and fixing the devices that help monitor the performance of different networks being utilized for research and computing, as well as working to update the infrastructure to a more modern and robust architecture.

What do you enjoy most about working at RCAC? I enjoy getting to work on the machines, working on technology that is in use and highly relevant- with projects that matter.

Tell us more about your favorite project you'd like to show off! Project title: Automated Unified Reconnaissance, Offensive Research, and Analysis (AURORA) Project description: This project of mine utilizes self-hosted reasoning large language models, which have been quantized for high performance at low cost- in order to automate tasks for cybersecurity such as recon and analysis. It can interact with systems and resources in order to accomplish tasks such as scanning for vulnerabilities, and cracking passwords. With future work I plan to allow it to attempt exploits, further it's integration with OSINT tools, and allow it to have much more granular control of machines.

What did you learn from this project? I learned how to accomplish basic Retrieval Augmented Generation techniques, how to utilize LLMs to automate tasks for me, and how to use less compute power to accomplish more.

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