Mario Raciti

Research Associate at INAF-OACT

A little about myself

My first "Hello, World!" took place in Catania in 1996, when I was born. Since I was a child I've been fascinated by computer science and cybersecurity. My main educational accomplishments are a Scientific Certificate (Italian secondary school diploma) (2015), a Bachelor's in Computer Science (AY 2017/18) and a Master's in Computer Science (AY 2019/2020), with focus in Network and Security Systems, at University of Catania, Italy.

From March 2020 to May 2020 I worked on a project as part of H2020 NEANIAS as a trainee at INAF-OACT (National Institute for Astrophysics - Astrophysical Observatory of Catania). Especially, I focused on the implementation of OpenStack REST-ful APIs and a Web service to extract sources from radio maps for the EOSC cloud infrastructure. Moreover, I've proudly kept collaborating with INAF-OACT focusing on Kubernetes, to extend the foreseen work by deploying scalable Docker containers. In January 2021 - and previously from October 2020 to January 2021 - I won a fellowship with INAF-OACT, where I'm currently a backend software developer as part of the TMSS (Telescope Manager Specification System) and LOFAR (Low-Frequency Array) projects. Especially, I'm working with ASTRON (Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) as a member of their Scrum (AGILE) development team.

My interests range in Networks, Cloud and Web security as well as Risk Management and Data Protection. Since February 2019 I've proudly been a Rev3rse Security - an awesome Italian community for ICT Security - collaborator and I'm currently an admin of the blog and the YT channel. In my spare time I also love playing CTFs, since it spurs me to deepen more and more cybersecurity topics - I collect my personal writeups in the CTF-Writeups repo as well. Sometimes I also share some tutorials and considerations regarding cybersecurity and privacy awareness in my Medium profile.

Publications:
⋄ Sciacca E. et al. (2020) Towards Porting Astrophysics Visual Analytics Services in the European Open Science Cloud. In: Arai K., Kapoor S., Bhatia R. (eds) Intelligent Computing. SAI 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1230. Springer, Cham.

Here some works

You can find full code and related docs on my Github profile.

AURA

AURA (AUtomotive Risk Assessment) is the name of my Master's thesis. In this work we propose a Risk Assessment exercise applied to an automotive scenario, according to the MAGERIT methodology and with the support of the PILAR/EAR commercial tool, in order to seek whether both the methodology and the tool may prove to be useful in the automotive field, with specific attention paid to potential threats against personal data en route from/to connected vehicles. Moreover, we also provide a regression analysis study of the algorithm implemented in Pilar for the purposes of reverse engineering, to better understand the values calculated by the tool in the demo.

VCrypture

VCrypture is an online service that allows you to encrypt your secret images safely using visual cryptographic algorithms. VCrypture is composed of two mainly parts: VCrypture-API and VCrypture-Web. The latter is a web server which provides the front-end as well as forwarding users' requests to the API core, whilst the former aims to perform visual cryptographic operations on images. The user can choose between four visual cryptographic algorithms: Naor-Shamir, Taghaddos-Latif, Dhiman-Kasana EVCT(N, N) and Dhiman-Kasana EVCT(K, N).

DSR Bad

The Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol is an example of reactive routing protocol for MANET networks. To work properly, DSR requires nodes to collaborate without maliciously inhibiting routing operations. In this scientific paper we present DSR Bad, a modification of the DSR module present in the ns-3 simulator, through which we aim to study and analyze two examples of non-cooperative scenarios that allow us to observe the impact suffered by the protocol and its reaction to situations not normally foreseen.

Tweet-Analyzer

Tweet-Analyzer is a tool developed in order to analyze given datasets of tweets, retrieved according the official Twitter API. The project allows you to get some metrics info about your tweets datasets, such as number of total tweets, retweets, quotes and users. Eventually, Tweet-Analyzer displays the outputs as charts, thanks to an external library.

QueKey

QueKey is the name of my Bachelor's thesis. The project is a cloud system for IoT Smart Lock devices placed in hotels and B&Bs. Its aim is, on the one hand, to make easy the handling of rooms and builds for the hotel managers and, on the other side, to give to their guests an easy way to lock and unlock rooms. QueKey consts of a main cloud service and of two physical devices: a RaspberryPi 3 (also other little boards are compatible with the system) and a NodeMCU with ESP8266 WiFi module.

FIAR

FIAR (Four-In-A-Row) is an online multiplayer game, with a vaporwave futuristic design inspired. Developed using NodeJS (Express & Socket.IO with rooms handling) and p5.js library (Processing based). FIAR can be played on Desktops, Tablets and Smartphones, thanks to its responsive design. Indeed the canvas containing the game is created in order to fit most of the display sizes.

Get in touch!

Please feel free to contact me and to follow me on my socials. If you are interested on my full CV, just send me an email.
Anyway, you can find further info about my resume on my Linkedin account.
Whether you are a tech enthusiast I suggest you to follow me on my Twitter account, as I actively post cybersecurity news.