Leadership & Team
Meet the faculty advisor and student co-captains guiding Binghamton University's cybersecurity and embedded systems competition team.
Academic Leadership
Dr. Aravind Prakash
Leads Systems Security and Binary Analysis research at Binghamton University. Serves as advisor for the eCTF team, integrating embedded security into the School of Computing curriculum.
Student Leadership
Samruddhi (Sammy) Deshpande
Competed in both 2025 and 2026 eCTF seasons. Leads defensive firmware architecture, authentication protocols, and member onboarding.
Pratik Kamble
Doctoral researcher in binary analysis, reverse engineering, and software debloating. Co-captain for the 2026 and 2027 eCTF campaigns.
Watson College Student Competitors
Nathan Brauning
“We learned how to think like an attacker or think like a defender from a cybersecurity standpoint. Participating in eCTF is good for that, because it forces you to compete with other schools. You're not just taking a class, we want to do better than other universities.”
Sky Jiang ’26
“There were a lot of concepts that we applied in this competition... cryptographic ideas, such as symmetric and asymmetric keys or the Diffie-Hellman key exchange method, as well as stuff like buffer overflows, which other groups took advantage of during the attack phase.”
Michael Florentino
“I'd be checking multiple documents and sending code back to other people, telling them what I thought they could do better or what they should change. Getting that skill in a team environment was very valuable.”
Bonnie Chen
“I would go to the lab where we have the board set up, and I'd watch our team captains do what they're doing so I can try to learn from them.”
Arianna Carchi ’26
“This was the first year in this competition for most of us, so the first month was tough, just trying to learn everything from MITRE. It's one of the best classes you can take if you want to learn cybersecurity, because it goes beyond the concepts. You get to do something hands-on: you actually work on something physical when you do hardware attacks on other schools.”