Shrikant Adhikarla (E 2013)
Security Engineer II, Microsoft
Bio
It was while wrapping up his undergraduate thesis in electrical and computer engineering that INI alumnus Shrikant Adhikarla discovered a personal quirk that makes him the savvy computer security expert that he is today: paranoia. In his case, it is a good thing.
Adhikarla channeled that trait of paranoia, along with experience gained in the INI’s Pittsburgh-Silicon Valley Master of Science in Information Technology - Information Security (MSIT-IS), to develop the skills necessary to land his dream job as a software security engineer at Microsoft.
He is involved in threat modeling, security review, exploit generation and penetrations testing to help secure Azure. With the recent increase in multiple TLS level attacks in the wild like BEAST, CRIME and POODLE, Adhikarla cites the nitty-gritty of TLS protocol learned in the INI’s Network Security course as vital to his current position. “Having a solid understanding of the TLS protocol and its internals, it was super easy to keep up with the new attacks/research and design mitigations for Azure cloud," he said.