Open to AI Security & DevSecOps roles

Chennai, India · open to the EU, UK & Ireland

Badathala
Jaisurya

builder

Ships AI security controls whose decisions you can read, not score.

Badathala Jaisurya. The left half is a photograph; the right half is the same face drawn as line work.

breaker

Red-teams them honestly and publishes what did not hold.

  • SentinelCore
  • IdenSec
  • CEH

I build the security layer that sits between AI models and the real world — prompt-injection firewalls, LLM gateways, hardened CI/CD and cloud infrastructure. CEH-certified, SOC-trained, now shipping AI defence tooling in the open.

50+AI tools shipped in prod
4+years in security & cloud
Why this is worth thirty seconds
  1. Defence that ships, not slideware

    Two open-source AI security tools in the wild — a model-agnostic threat gateway and a detection engine — plus a platform serving a paying customer.

  2. Numbers you can check yourself

    The detector is quoted as 96.8% precision and 17.7% recall, not precision alone — it rarely cries wolf and it misses most real attacks. The same engine runs in the lab below; paste anything and read the rules that fired.

  3. Research that publishes what failed

    Hypotheses are frozen before the runs. Four of them were falsified and are on this page with the evidence, rather than quietly dropped.

01Projects
AI Threat Gateway v0.4.0 · MIT

SentinelCore

A security layer between an AI application and the models, tools and data it touches — inspecting prompts, retrieved context, tool calls, MCP tool definitions and model output, then enforcing a policy on what happens next.

Source

The problem

An AI application exposes a model to untrusted user input, external documents, tools and other AI systems. That is a security boundary traditional AppSec never covered: the request is well-formed, the token is valid, the tool is permitted — and the content still decides what happens.

What it does

Five detectors run over every origin — input, each retrieved document, and output. Their findings feed a deterministic risk score and a configurable policy engine, which returns one of five decisions. As a reverse proxy it is OpenAI-path compatible, so it scans the response as well as the request, streaming included.

Request flow. Both the scan endpoint and the reverse proxy run the same registry, risk engine and policy engine.
Request scan · proxy Detector registry prompt_injection obfuscation · pii secrets · tool_arguments 5 detectors Findings input · context:i · output Risk engine Policy engine Decision ALLOW · WARN SANITIZE HUMAN_APPROVAL BLOCK risk_score

Evidence

  • 96.8%precision
  • 17.7%recall
  • 0.5%false-positive rate
  • 744labelled examples

345 malicious, 399 benign, from two MIT-licensed public sources. The recall is the honest signature of a rule-and-heuristic detector: it rarely cries wolf, and it misses most real-world attacks. The repository says so in those words, and an attack-replay lab tracks every version against the same set — v0.1 to v0.3, twenty attacks newly caught, zero regressions.

Agent Provenancev0.1 · MIT

IdenSec

Deterministic provenance enforcement for agent tool calls: it asks not who is calling but what determined this argument, and denies values that came from untrusted content.

  • Taints every value back to the origin that produced it
  • Denies tool arguments derived from untrusted content
  • No model, no network call, no runtime dependency
  • 96.7%security ceiling
  • AgentDojomeasured against
  • 0models in the path
  • Python
  • Taint tracking
  • pytest
Source
Researchactive

NeuroGenesis

A verification framework that turns LLM reasoning into structured representations and independently checks logic, factual and constraint violations before an answer is accepted.

  • Enumerates the shortcut space before a model is trained
  • Three independent solvers cross-check each result
  • Hypotheses preregistered; four were falsified and published
  • 1010maps pruned in ~1 ms
  • 47oracle tests passing
  • 4hypotheses falsified
  • Python
  • PyTorch 2.9
  • ASP
Source
Production SaaSin production

CipherAI

Multi-product AI platform spanning LLM chat, image and video generation, cybersecurity education, a job portal, hackathons and certification — with a credit system, payments and an admin console.

  • Founded it and shipped it to a paying client
  • Credit metering, payments and an admin console
  • Its own security review is published as a case study
  • 50+AI tools
  • Livepaying client
  • Razorpaypayments
  • Next.js
  • Node
  • Postgres
Visit
Also on the bench
Case Study

CipherAI Security Case Study

A written security review of my own platform: findings, fixes and what I would build differently.

Source
Knowledge Base

AI Security Guide

Notes on prompt injection, tool-call abuse and MCP poisoning, written while building defences for each.

Source
Home Lab

SOC Detection Lab

ELK and Splunk in an isolated lab: detection rules written, attacks simulated, response documented.

Source
Tooling

Endpoint Monitoring & Malware Lab

A USB and endpoint scanner built to watch what plugs into a machine and what it does next.

Source
02Live lab
POST /v1/chat/completions · inspect(input)
try:
policy engine · decision

0risk

ALLOW

Waiting for input…

Heuristic demo for illustration. The production engine adds ML evidence fusion (TF-IDF + LR baseline), PII redaction, audit trails and reverse-proxy enforcement. Read the real implementation →

03Experience
  1. DevOps Engineer

    March 2026 — Present

    Stackly

    • Manage cloud infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines supporting scalable backend deployment.
    • Operate containerised workloads with Docker, improving reliability and deployment consistency.
    • Drive DevOps practice across build, release and deployment workflows, with security gates in the pipeline.
    DockerCI/CDCloudLinux
  2. Founder & Engineer

    2025 — Present

    CipherAI · cipherai.in

    • Architected a multi-product AI SaaS platform: LLM chat, image and video generation, security education, job portal, hackathons and certification.
    • Integrated OpenAI/OpenRouter with Clerk auth, Firestore and Supabase storage to power 50+ AI tools on a credit-based usage system.
    • Shipped Razorpay payments and an admin dashboard; delivered to a real paying client, generating revenue from a live production SaaS.
    ReactTypeScriptLLM APIsSupabase
  3. Cybersecurity Intern

    2024

    Tata Consultancy Services

    • Conducted vulnerability assessments and risk analysis across enterprise infrastructure, identifying security gaps.
    • Monitored alerts in SIEM tooling, supported incident triage and response, and authored remediation reports.
    SIEMVAPTIAM
  4. Cybersecurity Intern

    2024

    CFSS Pvt Ltd

    • Assisted penetration testing and ethical hacking exercises across web and network applications.
    • Performed Linux hardening and configuration security reviews; documented secure operating procedures.
    PentestingLinux
  5. B.Tech, Computer Science & Business Systems

    2025

    Rajalakshmi Institute of Technology · Chennai

    • Graduated while running CTF practice, a home SOC lab and freelance security work in parallel.
    CSBSChennai

Achievements

  • 100 Capture the Flag challenges solved across platforms
  • Runner-up National Cybersecurity Hackathon
  • Top 3% globally in security competitions and on TryHackMe
  • Revenue generated from a live production AI SaaS product
languages
Englishతెలుగుதமிழ்हिन्दी
04Research

NeuroGenesis · open research

Does provable identifiability predict empirical symbol grounding?

A neuro-symbolic model can score the right label through the wrong concepts and still satisfy its knowledge base. Accuracy looks fine; interpretability and out-of-distribution behaviour are gone. Theory can decide before training whether a constraint set pins the concept mapping down. This asks whether that prediction survives contact with gradient descent.

  • 1010candidate maps pruned in ~1 ms
  • 2,000differential comparisons, exact agreement
  • 47oracle correctness tests passing
Source

Shortcut space by task, before any training

Concept mappings that satisfy y = (c₁ + w·c₂) mod 10. One surviving map means the task pins the concepts down; ten means every cyclic shift scores identically. The oracle decides this from the constraint set alone — no model, no data.

0 5 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
  • uniquely identifiable
  • admits shortcuts

weight w · |RS| = surviving maps

Table view
w|RS|
12
21
32
45
52
61
72
81
910
SentinelCoreablation study · 170 agent traces

Does knowing where a prompt came from make a gateway safer?

Given a ground-truth detector, provenance-aware policy adds 47 points of attack prevention at no cost to legitimate work. Given a real learned detector it adds 2.4 points, not statistically significant, and costs about 9 points of benign completion. Oracle evaluation overstates the mechanism by roughly 20× — and the misleading result is the one that is statistically solid.

  • H1Detection recall, not policy, is the binding constraintstands · APR 0.28 → 0.94
  • H2Provenance-aware risk scoring raises attack preventionfalsified · 0 of 37 decisions changed
  • H3Applying provenance to the policy rule instead of the score fixes H2falsified · 0 of 37
  • H4Provenance is free — measured under an oracle detectorsuperseded, kept unedited
  • H5Oracle evaluation systematically overstates anything layered on detectionstands · ≈20×
  • 0.185 → 0.884recall, rules vs learned · 10 seeds
  • 4.78×representative improvement
  • p ≤ 5.6×10⁻⁶McNemar, 10 of 10 seeds
  • 149 / 170payloads written by someone else

H2 and H3 failed for one reason: provenance re-weights findings that already exist. The four attacks surviving every configuration produced zero findings, and zero multiplied by any trust factor is still zero. The first run used 37 self-authored traces with ±18-point intervals, so the honest next step was five times more traces rather than another mechanism — the current benchmark takes its attack text from a held-out public split instead of writing it here.

Read the evaluation
01

Preregistered

Predicted directions are frozen before confirmatory runs. Anything outside that list is labelled exploratory.

02

Differentially validated

Pruned DFS, declarative ASP and a deliberately naive enumerator share no code. Disagreement caught a real reporting bug.

03

Traceable

Every published number traces to a run manifest or a test. Nothing is typed from memory.

The hypothesis ledger

Four of these did not survive contact with data. They are recorded here, not quietly dropped.

  • H1Identifiability predicts groundingstanding
  • H2Margin beats binary identifiability — was the headline candidatefalsified · ΔR² 0.0015
  • H3Association survives controlling for confoundsstanding
  • H4Rule selection beats concept supervision on costfalsified · 50 labels vs 2 rules
  • H5Convergence rate rises with shortcut countdemoted · ρ +0.034
  • H7Deterministic theory under-specifies what SGD findsrejected same session

Status: the oracle is built and validated; no empirical claims are made beyond what the runs support.

05Capabilities
  • LLM guardrails & prompt-injection defence
  • AI red teaming (garak, PyRIT, manual)
  • Threat modelling for agents & MCP
  • Detection engineering & eval harnesses
  • Adversarial ML / model robustness
OWASP LLM Top 10MITRE ATLASNIST AI RMFGuardrails SandboxingSemantic filtersJailbreak taxonomyPII redaction
06Certifications
  • earned
    Certified Ethical Hacker EC-Council
    Issued
    19 Apr 2025
    Credential ID
    ECC6479058231
    renews
    1 May 2026
  • earned
    Fortinet NSE 1 Certified in Cybersecurity Fortinet Verify credentialCredly
07Badges

Badge artwork is pulled from Credly and TryHackMe on every build.

08About

I work on the seam between a model and everything it is allowed to touch. That seam is where the interesting failures live: a tool call whose argument came from a web page, a retrieved document that carries an instruction, a prompt that reaches a model with more authority than the person who sent it.

Most of what I build is deliberately boring in its decision path. SentinelCore's verdicts come from rules you can read; IdenSec keeps the model out of the decision entirely. That is a choice, not a limitation — a security control you cannot explain is one you cannot defend in a review.

I came to this from security operations rather than from research: SIEM alerts, vulnerability assessment, incident response, then DevSecOps and cloud. That order matters. I am less interested in whether an attack is novel than in whether the thing I shipped will hold on a Tuesday afternoon when nobody is watching it.

What I want next is work where the security of AI systems is the product, not an afterthought bolted on before launch — building defences, red-teaming them honestly, and publishing what did not hold.

Currently
  • BuildingSentinelCore and IdenSec — a gateway and a provenance layer for agentic systems
  • ResearchingWhether identifiability predicts symbol grounding, with the negative results published
  • WorkingDevOps engineering at Stackly; cloud infrastructure and CI/CD with security gates
  • StudyingCompTIA Security+ and Network+, alongside Kubernetes
09Contact

Hiring for AI security, DevSecOps or cloud?

I am open to full-time roles across Europe, the UK, Ireland and India, and to focused consulting on securing AI systems. Fastest route is email — I reply within a day.

CipherAI

cipherai.in

Based in

Chennai, India · open to relocation & remote

Open to

AI Security Engineer · AI Safety & Security Researcher · DevSecOps · MLOps