Riley Hester Email & Phone Number

Falls Church, VA, US

Hanover, MD, US

Omaha, Nebraska, US

• Reverse engineered industrial control systems and medical devices to identify vulnerabilities
• Developed innovative solutions to mitigate cyber-attack impact on cyber-physical systems
• Co-authored a base study that resulted in a contract and funding from DARPA to explore and develop solutions for improved security in modern life-critical systems including smart medical devices, industrial control.
• Stepped in to work closely with team lead as assistant team lead to support the team and provide a point of contact to the team for clients and NARI’s C-suite
• Wrote software and design documentation, project proposals, progress reports, and technical reports to capture the team’s work on proofs of concept, experiments, and design decisions
• Taught middle-school students how to perform firmware extraction and binary analysis on an ARM-based target to generate interest in cyber security

Omaha, Nebraska, US

• Reverse engineered software and hardware of HMIs and PLCs to inform the design of virtual devices on hardware virtualization platform
• Collaborated with a multi-disciplinary team of engineers, data scientists, and developers to develop hardware virtualization platform for embedded systems
• Developed a command-line tool in Python that used interface library routines to connect to and manipulate the memory of NXP HCS12X microcontrollers
• Extracted firmware from physical systems to run on the virtual platform and verify accurate emulation of target physical systems
• Implemented shadow stack for virtual hardware platform to protect virtual devices against stack exploitation to which physical devices may be vulnerable

Omaha, Nebraska, US

• Collaborated with an Agile team of experienced developers and other interns to organize work items and used a Kanban board to monitor project progress and distribute workload
• Used Git to make regular contributions to the early stages of a hardware virtualization platform
• Wrote C++ code to implement a memory management unit, instruction set, and execution pipeline for a virtualized NXP HCS12X microcontroller

Omaha, Nebraska, US

• Collaborated with graduate students on their research of cognitive multihop wireless networks with non-stationary nodes such as moving vehicles communicating with radio base stations.
• Learned to use Python and GNURadio to configure a testbed consisting of USRP N210 software-defined radios for heterogeneous radio network experiments
• Performed experiments using the radio testbed to determine become familiar with principles of multihop wireless network communications