About Me on Houlton McGuinn

(Un)-fortunately, there’s no standardized Leetcode-esque interview process for security engineers 1.

I built a prediction market bot in a few hours that ranked fourth in Manifold’s Platinum Sage Gremlins league for March.

Vim apparently has built-in encryption features.

I’m starting open office hours to chat tech!

I’m taking Giving What We Can’s Trial Pledge 🔷 to donate 10% of my income in 2025 to highly effective charities.

Summary I discovered a vulnerability allowing arbitrary command injection as root in Trane XL824, XL850, XL1050, and Pivot smart thermostats using a specially crafted filename.

I’ve been using (neo)vim as my main IDE for the last several years.

Today I learned that revocable encryption exists!

17.

Continuing with Cryptopals, the second set focuses on block ciphers.

Cryptopals is a set of cryptography challenges by the NCC Group.

This one I think is really cool.

This was the first piece of generative art I’ve made!

This was my final project for COMP 590: Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

I’ve been interested in astronomy and space since I was a kid, but never really did much with it.

I worked on this project during my internship at Georgia Tech Research Institute in their Embedded Systems Vulnerability Division.

During my internship at Georgia Tech Research Institute in their CIPHER lab, I was part of the team that placed second and won $10,000 for Track 1 at HackTheMachine 2021.

I worked on this project during my internship at Sandia National Laboratories.