Sijan Mainali

About

I am a junior undergraduate Computer Science student, cybersecurity researcher, and hacker. I currently work with Prof. Afsah Anwar in the Beyond Defense Lab at the University of New Mexico.

Outside research, I like art, design and motion, photography, cooking, and music. I keep more personal and photographic work at sijan.dev.

Research

My current research centers on iOS and macOS security.

I am especially interested in moving beyond isolated bugs toward the recurring patterns that create them. As open-weight and open-source models approach frontier capability and inference costs continue to fall, reverse engineering and bespoke exploit search can be parallelized at a scale that changes the economics of vulnerability research. I want to understand which mitigations remain structurally sound when search is abundant, how those defenses constrain an attacker's capabilities, and how AI can broaden hypothesis generation without replacing human judgment or independent validation.

Research interests

• iOS and macOS internals, reverse engineering, and vulnerability research
• Security contracts across Swift, Objective-C, C, Core Foundation, IPC, and kernel boundaries
• Memory safety, object lifetime, authorization, sandboxing, and confused-deputy problems
• XNU, IOKit, system services, platform mitigations, and exploitability analysis
• Root-cause generalization: bug patterns, capability maps, and mitigation design
• Rigorous AI-assisted security research, tooling, and experimental validation

Selected Projects

mcp²

An MCP-first AI calendar built at HackMIT 2025 to coordinate interview preparation, scheduling, and context across tools.

QuickOTP

A Chrome extension that surfaces one-time passwords and verification links from Gmail in the browser. The team won Best Use of Workshop Tech at VandyHacks XI. Source code.

Alexa MCP Server

An experimental Model Context Protocol server for connecting compatible clients with Amazon Alexa workflows.

Circle2Search

A macOS experiment inspired by Android's Circle to Search interaction.

Career Lens

A tool for visualizing job-application status from email.

Selected Recognition

• 2025: Won second place in Lica World's Best AI-Augmented Designer challenge at HackMIT with mcp², an MCP-first AI calendar for interview scheduling and preparation. Project repository. Project video.
• 2025: Won first place with Alabama A&M University's team at the inaugural 1890 Cyber & AI Games and was the only student to solve the CT Edge AI Challenge. University announcement.
• 2024: QuickOTP won Best Use of Workshop Tech at VandyHacks XI and a winner prize at the Nosu AI Hackathon. Project record.

Contact and Links

For research, open-source, or collaboration inquiries, email is the best way to reach me.