Education

University of South Alabama, Mobile, AL

PhD in Computing 2016-2019 (Expected)

Advisor: Prof. Dr. J. Todd McDonald
Area of Interest: Homomorphic Obfuscation, Software Security, MATE Attacks, Reverse Engineering, Obfuscation, White Box Cryptography, Homomorphic Encryption, Component Encryption.

University of South Alabama, Mobile, AL

Master of Science: Computer and Information Systems 2014-2016

Advisor: Prof. Dr. J. Todd McDonald
Master's Thesis: “Comparing the Effectiveness of Commercial Obfuscators against Man-at-the-End Attacks”

Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad, India

Bachelor of Science: Computer Science Engineering 2010-2014

Projects:
March 2014 - Security Analysis of a Single Sign-On Mechanism for Distributed Computer Networks
December 2013 -Technical Seminar Evaluation Systems

Publications

August 2017

Enhanced Operating System Protection to Support Digital Forensic Investigations

McDonald, J. T., Manikyam, R., Glisson, W. B., Andel, T. R., & Gu, Y. X. (2017, August). Enhanced Operating System Protection to Support Digital Forensic Investigations. In Trustcom/BigDataSE/ICESS, 2017 IEEE (pp. 650-659). IEEE.

December 2016

Comparing the Effectiveness of Commercial Obfuscators against MATE Attacks

Manikyam, R., McDonald, J. T., Mahoney, W. R., Andel, T. R., & Russ, S. H. (2016, December). Comparing the effectiveness of commercial obfuscators against MATE attacks. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Software Security, Protection, and Reverse Engineering (p. 8). ACM.


Experience

University of South Alabama

Graduate Research Assistant June 2016 - Present

Working on implementing and evaluating a general program protection using the features from White-box Cryptography, Homomorphic Encryption and Component Encryption

Charmed Promotions

Software Developer (Intern) January 2016 - August 2016

Migration of website from classic ASP to ASP.NET Coding changes (HTML, ASPX, Code behind, Client-Side Script, C# Class Libraries, Windows Service, Web Services etc.) and ensure a successful build.
Plan and Identify the core stack order for deployment and prioritize completion of product in correct order.

University of South Alabama

Graduate Research Assistant January 2015 - May 2016

Assisted in the presentation of lab demonstrations during the field trip activities that are computing-based learning activities connected to STEM curriculum.
The topics included forensics, software protection, malware analysis, network defense, cyber warfare, and personal web security.

Maisa Solutions Limited

Software Developer (Intern) January 2014 - June 2014

Collaborated with Product Management and User Experience experts regarding product definition, schedule, scope and project-related decisions.
Built, tested and deployed scalable, highly available and modular consumer based application "kidslink" using Ruby on Rails.


Presentations&

Awards

Attended the security conference and workshop ACSAC 2017 in Orlando, Florida

Presented paper "Enhanced Operating System Protection to Support Digital Forensic Investigations" at SPREG and DFII

Presented paper "Comparing the Effectiveness of Commercial Obfuscators against Man-at-the-End Attacks" at SSPREW-6

Presented paper "Comparing the effectiveness of Commercial Obfuscators against Man-at-the-End Attacks" at SPREG and DFII

Presented a workshop on "Cyber Ethics and Hacking" during Cyber Awareness Month

Presented Master's thesis "Comparing the effectiveness of Commercial Obfuscators against Man-at-the-End Attacks" in 3MT

Academic Topper for four consecutive years (2010-2014)

Awarded second for presenting a paper on Surface Computing at AAGAMA'13 (National Level Technical Fest held at the Anurag Group of Institutions)

Received memento and appreciation for organizing the fest Tekzion'12 (National Level Techno-Cultural Symposium) in the state of Telangana, India