Ali Rizvi-santiago
Senior Vulnerability Researcher Engineer at Cisco / Talos
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAli Rizvi-santiago is a Senior Vulnerability Researcher/Engineer with 16+ years of deep technical experience in reverse engineering, vulnerability discovery, and security-focused systems engineering. Based in Austin, he blends low-level expertise in C and assembler with modern DevOps practices—contributing to notable open-source projects like SaltStack and HashiCorp Packer—while building tooling to automate fuzzing and cross-debugger workflows. His career spans offensive research at Cisco Talos and HP/TippingPoint where he developed custom IDA/LLDB/GDB integrations, emulators, and grammar parsers to scale analysis and exploit development. Comfortable across the full stack, he favors going straight to source or disassembly to understand systems, and has a longstanding fascination with protocol internals and complex data structures. Not obvious from titles: he’s shipped production-grade infrastructure for distributing fuzzers and ported debugging/IPC primitives between POSIX and Windows internals to enable cross-platform analysis.
16 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
High School, High School at Lake Brantley High SchoolHigh School, High School at Johnathan Law High School
Spanish
Github Skills (31)
filesystem10
file-management10
python10
configuration-management10
batchfile10
osdev10
chef-client10
automation10
script10
go10
saltstack10
virtualization10
infrastructure-as-code10
chef-solo10
batch10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
boxcutter/windows-batch
Dec 2017 - May 2021
Virtual machine templates for Windows written in legacy JSON and Batch Scripting/JScript
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:1 review, 161 commits, 74 PRs in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Ali focused on improving the automation and configuration management aspects of the Windows virtual machine templates. Their contributions primarily involved modifying the `cmtool.bat` script, which appears to handle the installation and configuration of various configuration management tools like Chef and Puppet. The user updated the script to support more versions of these tools, corrected its logic, and improved its download capabilities by integrating with the Omnitruck API and falling back to alternative download methods when needed.
jscriptscriptingvirtual-machinewindows
hashicorp/packer
Nov 2015 - Feb 2021
Packer is a tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration.
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:1 review, 155 commits, 36 PRs in 5 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Ali primarily focused on enhancing the `packer` tool's functionality for creating floppy disk images. They added support for recursively including subdirectories when adding files to the floppy disk, implemented backwards compatibility for older syntax, and introduced a new "floppy_dirs" keyword. The user also improved logging for file copying and addressed several bug fixes related to path handling, particularly for Windows systems.
packer
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