Cyber Member Spotlight — Gideon Tong
Learn more about ACM Cyber member Gideon Tong!
What’s your major? What drew you to this field?
I study Electrical Engineering with focus on machine learning and controls — I think it’s really cool to bridge the gap between building great software and building great hardware, and with a better understanding of hardware, I can write software that runs faster than anyone else’s. It’s also great to expand a little and not totally be stuck in the computer science bubble as well. My dad taught me how to build my first computer when I was 4, and gave me a Borland C++ book for my 5th birthday, to which I learned programming on. This was long before I had any internet access and I actually installed the IDE via a CD, which no one uses anymore.
How did you become interested in cybersecurity?
I didn’t have WiFi in my house and I had a Wii which I wanted to play Mario Kart Online, and began my foray into the world of Linux utilities like airmon-ng for cracking WiFi passwords. While this might not have been the most ethical thing in the world, a week after I cracked it my neighbor removed the password from their WiFi, thus allowing anyone to connect and allowing me to play Mario Kart Online to my heart’s content. My interest throughout the years has been very surface-level, so naturally I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about what to study to obtain an A+ certificate.
What are some cool cybersecurity related/other projects you’ve undertaken? Or have there been any fun CTFs you’ve participated in recently?
I recently set up a compute cluster of Chinese single-board computers, Raspberry Pi’s, and iPhones totalling 96 cores and 54 GB of RAM. It sips power since I’ve throttled each board to 5W of usage through a custom power delivery solution I built myself (is this the EE in me speaking?) and it’s wired up using a random gigabit switch I bought from eBay. That, in turn, is built into a larger network that I’m currently developing to be on 10 gigabit (if I can find a switch under $50, that is), to connect wired/wirelessly 7 members of a group that I’m a part of. All this is going to be used for interesting things…
What are your long term goals (if any) ?
In terms of cybersecurity, I’d like to reverse engineer the Broadcom stack for the iPhone 6S. This great little board has a strange binary stack that is hard to reverse engineer, even with a cracked SEP (secure enclave) and the ability to run arbitrary code and even Linux (see projects like Sandcastle and checkra1in), only WiFi/Bluetooth for the Apple A8 has been solved, and the Apple A9 is still much of a mystery.
What’s a fun fact about you :D
I like to use things for as long as possible, so my main computer is a 12 year old dual-core desktop. It’s definitely on its last legs, but I can still run Valorant at around 20–30 FPS in a virtual machine so it’s not dead yet. I actually run everything in VMs so I can pull the reset at any time. It does take a lot of disk storage, however!
What are your hobbies / what do you like to do in your free time?
My projects are pretty large-scale, and it’s not uncommon for me to commit hundreds of thousands of lines per project over the course of a year or spend hours and hours debugging a board. More recently I released my Discord bot to the public and it’s now hovering around 150,000 total users, which has caused unnecessary strain on my server network.
And finally, do you have any advice/something to say to the readers?
When you want to do something, just do it. It may be too hard, your goals may change, you may abandon your project. But your journey teaches you, and it teaches you rather quickly. You may not realize your project is hard (see XKCD #1425), but you’ll learn a little more breadth of knowledge by attempting it. Even challenges that seem insurmountable can easily be broken down into parts, especially in engineering and computer science. And make sure to participate in social events in your field, whether that be hackathons, CTFs, pitch competitions or otherwise, as you’ll learn fast and meet lots of cool people.
