Semarang, tekkom.ft.undip.ac.id – Muhammad Alifa Ramdhan, Computer Engineering student Class of 2019 works as a Security Researcher at STAR Labs SG, Singapore. It has been 2 years since December 2020 that Alifa joined the company engaged in cyber security services. His work focuses on research by looking for security gaps in the field of technology: container security, kernel security and hypervisor security.
Alifa, who is one of the Security Researchers at STAR Labs SG, had the opportunity to take part in the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) contest on May 18 – 20, 2022, together with his colleagues joined one team. The Zero Day Initiative is a contest held annually by TrendMicro –Japanese security software companies. The contest gives awards to Security Researchers for addressing vulnerabilities / gaps in cyber security.
In the contest, the teams were asked to demonstrate security holes found from various popular applications such as: VMWare, Chrome, Windows, MS Teams, to Tesla. Alifa and team targeted the VirtualBox application in the Virtualization category. He and his team researched the vulnerability of the application and created an exploit program. The time given for the team to demonstrate the results was only five minutes with three tries. Alifa and the team managed to hack the targeted program with 3 minutes 45 seconds left on the first try. They managed to get a prize of $40,000 and 4 Master of Pwn points.
“The impression was quite stressful because we only had 3x the chance of failing to demonstrate exploitation. It turns out that in just 1 chance our team managed to hack the targeted program, namely VirtualBox,” said Alifa. He also added that in the process of his research, many new things were found such as exploitation techniques learned.
Alifa conveyed her message to other fellow students, “Never despair if you want to achieve something, so you are a person who is always curious and thirsty for knowledge, so that you can continue to be enthusiastic about learning and exploring knowledge”.