hi, i'm

lucy satheesan (she/her)

developer, researcher, student.

I'm interested in understanding software systems, small and large, and making them faster, safer, and more equitable. I'm currently a student at Miami University, studying Computer Science. I've worked on many projects, from reverse engineering Pixel firmware and exam surveillance software, to wrapping io_uring in Swift.

I'm currently working on:

• Building an n-day exploit for the Pixel 6/6a bootloader
• Transforming PDFs into more accessible documents and identifying text semantics

There's a summary of the places I've worked and the projects I've done below. To contact me, reach out to me at me@[this domain].

Software Engineer Intern, Low Level Swift

May '23 - Aug '23, Apple, Cupertino, CA

Engineering role in a hybrid, mostly-remote team, building an interface for io_uring in Swift.

• Designed a safe, easy-to-use interface for Linux asynchronous file I/O
• Triaged performance issues in the Swift Concurrency Runtime on Linux
• Explored optimizing core array algorithms; potential performance improvements of 30+%

Software Engineer

Dec '20 - Aug '21, May - Aug '22, Coder Technologies, Remote

Engineering roles in several teams, maintaining a fork and building a new open-source product.

• Exposed new product functionality to React.js frontend
• Reduced CI times from 30 to 4 minutes by restructuring GitHub Actions pipelines
• Improved release delays by a week by leading schedule adjustments to track upstream
• Fixed client rendering bugs on iOS, triaged setup issues across Linux distros and architectures

Resident Assistant

Jan '22 - May '22, Aug '22 - Present, Miami University

Community building role with strong focus on communication.

• Interacted one-on-one with residents to put them in touch with college resources
• Mediated conflicts between residents and performed safety and wellness checks

Winter Teaching Assistant

Jan '22, Miami University, Remote

Teaching role for a second-semester intro programming course.

• Provided individual assistance with object-oriented programming concepts in Java
• Wrote tools in Bash to automate homework grading

Unpaper (Rust, PDF)

Aug '23 - Present

Accessibility tool for converting PDF to HTML while preserving text semantics.

• Designed a pipeline to process position-encoded text to identify text features (headings, paragraphs, …)
• Built an interactive graphical tool to visualize and debug text identification

eM2late (Python, C/C++)

Jun '22 - Present

Research project to reverse engineer and document security design in Google Tensor/Titan M2 on Pixel 6.

• Reverse engineered firmware using IDA (armv7), Binary Ninja and Ghidra (RV32)
• Fixed bugs and improved performance of Binary Ninja's RV32 lifter plugin
• Extended Unicorn with hooks to rapidly prototype behavior for unknown instructions

Banyan (Rust)

Aug '21 - Mar '22

Proof-of-concept filesystem management layer for backups and container builds.

• Wrote and debugged atomic data structures using ASAN/TSAN and Valgrind
• Improved performance by ~2x by restructuring code to minimize system calls and string interpolations

Exam Surveillance Software Analysis (JavaScript, NaCl)

Oct '20 - Mar '21

Analyzed exam surveillance tools; work covered by New York Times, Consumer Reports, Motherboard.

• Built tools to reverse engineer obfuscated JavaScript and Chrome NaCl code
• Identified several security vulnerabilities and algorithmic bias issues

• Font: Alexandria, designed by Mohamed Gaber and Julieta Ulanovsky, SIL Open Font License
• Portions of CSS from minireset.css, (C) Jeremy Thomas, MIT License