Hi, I'm Ayush RoyChowdhury. I build and break AI systems so we can ship safer ones.

DefCon 32 · AI Village ASPLOS '24 · Workshop Press: Dark Reading, Security Magazine

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Research

Confused Deputy Risks in RAG-based LLMs (ConfusedPilot)

Jan 2024 – Aug 2025

Explores confused-deputy risks in production RAG (e.g., Copilot for M365) and shows how malicious docs can steer retrieval/grounding. Presented at Defcon 32 AI Village

RAG Security LLM Enterprise Defcon 32 AI Village
Project

Learning-based Detection of Microarchitectural Attacks

Jan 2024 – Apr 2024

SoK + RL prototypes for detecting microarchitectural attacks; presented at ASPLOS '24 workshop & ACE Symposium.

RL Side-channels SoK
SoK Site

Experience

Zenity — Security R&D Intern (Austin)
Sep 2025 – Dec 2025
  • Red-team framework for assessing LLM robustness to indirect prompt injection & jailbreaks.
  • Pentesting agentic AI across Copilot for M365, ChatGPT, Cursor, Salesforce.
NVIDIA — Security Development Engineer Intern (Santa Clara)
May 2025 – Aug 2025
  • Red-teamed AI agents for privacy/knowledge-integrity issues.
  • Built activation-based jailbreak classifiers (LR/XGBoost/NN/CNN) pluggable at inference-time.
Zenity — Security R&D Intern (Austin)
Sep 2024 – Apr 2025
  • Red-teamed Copilot for M365 & Copilot Studio Agents focusing on data exfil/privacy.
  • Contributed to PowerPwn & an open GenAI Security Matrix.
Cox Automotive — Software Engineering Intern (Austin)
May 2024 – Aug 2024
  • Infra for RAG with sparse retrieval on AWS; routing vs non-routing perf study for OpenSearch.
  • Built secure BFF (C# + AWS) and Copilot tool for Rally artifacts with Purview + AAD governance.
Trend Micro — Cloud R&D Intern (Austin)
Jun 2023 – Aug 2023
  • Automated bug-fix pipeline via AWS IoT, middleware, and OpenAI API for triage suggestions.
Trend Micro — Cloud Automation R&D Intern (Austin)
Jun 2022 – Aug 2022
  • Prototyped network appliance management features in Cloud One; KMS-integrated Lambda flows.

Projects

Web Application Security Lab

Recon (nmap/Wireshark), SYN flood (Scapy), Docker+K8s deploy, plus common web vulns & mitigations.

nmap Wireshark Scapy Docker Kubernetes

RSA & AES-128 (CTR) + DPA

C/C++ crypto from primitives; Python DPA on power traces to recover keys.

C/C++ CTR DPA

Lingobin

Code-switch translation helper using Whisper; auto-tests via Kaggle & HF datasets.

Whisper Python NLP

GSTAgri (Edge AI + IoT)

Satellite-connected asset monitoring to anticipate crop risk; edge alerts to save bandwidth/costs.

Edge AI IoT Globalstar

Meals on Wheels — Delivery App

React/JS/SQL backend + Salesforce integration for volunteer route logistics.

React SQL Salesforce

Education

University of Texas at Austin — MS ECE

Aug 2024 – May 2026
  • Track: Architecture, Computer Systems, Embedded Systems
  • Thesis: Reliability & Security of Compound AI Systems
  • TA: Enterprise Network Security · Software Engineering II · Multithreading Prog/Arch/Tools

University of Texas at Austin — BS ECE (w/ Business Minor)

  • Track: Software Engineering & Systems
  • TA: Intro to Embedded Systems

Press

Dark Reading

Read feature

Security Magazine

Read feature

SecureWorld

Read feature

Defcon 32 AI Village Talk [Research: ConfusedPilot]

August 10th, 2024

ASPLOS '24 Talk [Research: LDMA]

April 28th, 2024

Microsoft SLG Talk on Emerging Threats in AI

August 9th, 2025

Heroes (for fun)

DC

Batman Wonder Woman The Flash

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Marvel

Iron Man Spider‑Man Black Panther

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