About Me

By 0xh4ty

Welcome

I’m 0xh4ty, a systems programmer and security researcher focused on understanding how systems behave, where they fail, and how they can be broken.

This blog is a record of that exploration. It covers security research, reverse engineering, blockchain systems, and the design and implementation of low-level and distributed systems. The goal is not just to use systems, but to understand them deeply enough to reason about their behavior under real constraints.

Path

I started in Web2 security and spent a couple of years building a foundation in penetration testing and web exploitation. During this time, I earned the HTB Certified Web Exploitation Specialist (CWES) certification and developed a working understanding of common vulnerability classes and exploitation patterns.

Over time, I structured my learning to build intuition across layers of abstraction, moving from higher-level systems toward lower-level and more complex environments:

Web application security -> Web3 security (Ethereum) -> Rust programming -> Web3 security (Solana) -> Reverse engineering -> Distributed systems engineering

Each transition increased both complexity and depth. The progression moved from exploiting application logic, to reasoning about on-chain state machines, to writing systems code, to analyzing compiled binaries, and finally to designing systems that must remain correct under concurrency, failure, and adversarial conditions.

I am currently pursuing a Master of Computer Applications (MCA), while continuing to focus heavily on hands-on systems work outside of formal coursework.

Work

My work sits at the intersection of systems and security, with an emphasis on understanding failure modes and building intuition through direct interaction with real systems.

• Reproducing real-world smart contract vulnerabilities
• Writing exploit proof-of-concepts and validating attack surfaces
• Reverse engineering Linux binaries using Ghidra and GDB
• Contributing to open source compiler-adjacent tooling
• Building a Solidity language server for Emacs
• Developing a Rust-based static site generator that powers this blog

I focus on depth over breadth. The goal is to understand invariants, constraints, and edge cases rather than relying on surface-level patterns.

Approach

I treat systems as artifacts that can be taken apart and studied. This involves reading code, tracing execution, inspecting memory layouts, and rebuilding simplified models to verify understanding.

Whenever possible, I prefer:

• Writing small reproductions instead of relying on theory alone
• Validating assumptions through debugging and instrumentation
• Studying real implementations instead of abstract descriptions

This approach helps build intuition that transfers across domains such as security, distributed systems, and low-level programming.

Tooling

• Operating System: Linux
• Primary Language: Rust
• Editor and Workflow: Emacs

My tooling choices are driven by control, visibility, and the ability to inspect system behavior closely.

Current Focus

My current focus is distributed systems engineering.

This includes building and understanding systems that deal with state replication, consistency, failure handling, and coordination across nodes. I am particularly interested in how these systems behave under partial failure and adversarial conditions.

Alongside this, I continue to work on:

• Reverse engineering
• Vulnerability discovery
• Strengthening low-level systems intuition

Contact

• GitHub: github.com/0xh4ty
• Twitter: twitter.com/0xh4ty

This blog exists to document my journey in systems programming and security research and to share what I learn along the way.

If you are working on similar problems or following a similar path, feel free to reach out.