Researcher  ·  Engineer  ·  Builder

Kartikeyan
Subramanyam

UCSD Center for Healthcare Cybersecurity  ·  ARPA-H DIGIHEALS Program
University of California, San Diego — B.S. Computer Science

I build systems that stay operational when the surrounding environment is failing. My work sits at the intersection of critical infrastructure security, network architecture, and operational intelligence: from physically deploying backup hospital networks during ransomware attacks to building national-scale passive monitoring pipelines for medical network infrastructure across the United States.

ARPA-H DIGIHEALS Co-Inventor · U.S. Provisional Patent OSCP (in progress)
✉ Contact ▶ CRASHCART Demo H-R3P Program
Kartikeyan Subramanyam

Current Research and Work

Following a presentation of CRASHCART to ARPA-H Director Dr. Alicia Jackson, the system has received active encouragement toward commercialization from multiple government agencies and healthcare professionals. Entrepreneurial efforts to bring CRASHCART to market are ongoing.
Computational and Data Sciences Research Specialist
June 2024 – Present
UCSD Center for Healthcare Cybersecurity
Healthcare Ransomware Resiliency and Response Program (H-R3P) · ARPA-H DIGIHEALS
  • Lead engineer across two concurrent research programs spanning disaster-recovery infrastructure and national-scale hospital network intelligence, delivering systems across both simulation and live hospital environments.
  • Presented research outcomes to ARPA-H Director Dr. Alicia Jackson; received active institutional encouragement from multiple government agencies to pursue commercialization.
CRASHCART Principal Network Systems Engineer
  • Designed and deployed a self-contained "hospital-network-in-a-box" to restore critical clinical functionality during ransomware-induced outages, operating fully independent of compromised hospital infrastructure to eliminate co-infection risk during recovery.
  • Architected a hybrid network (Starlink + Cellular Backhaul) with segmented L2/L3 design, point-to-point wireless links, and private CBRS-based cellular LAN, providing resilient, rapidly deployable connectivity under degraded conditions.
  • Reconstructed clinical system dependencies (EHR, lab systems, patient monitoring, radiology/PACS, printing) into a portable architecture; solving hidden middleware and integration constraints required for end-to-end clinical functionality.
  • Engineered critical workflow integrations: remote printing via IPSec VPN tunneling, lab result routing through LIS/middleware stack into EPIC EHR (resource limited), isolated life-critical patient monitoring networks (inherent by vendor design), PACS/DICOM server configuration, and cellular handoff stabilization via PTP master clock (initially restricted by vendor design).
  • Led first live field deployment at El Centro Regional Medical Center, CA and subsequent deployment at ValleyWise Health Medical Center, AZ: identifying real-world constraints (thermal degradation at 110°F, PoE power delivery failure, physical access limitations) and adapting system design to ensure reliable operation under field conditions.
  • Led multi-level research team (undergraduate and graduate students) through concurrent research/engineering sprint cycles: initally scoping workstreams and experiments (under guidance from mentors), eventually managing collaborations, and maintaining delivery quality under high-ambiguity, time-constrained conditions.
Ransomwhere? Data Scientist Platform Engineer
  • Inherited a partially functional system mid-project with no handover documentation; rebuilt it from the ground up while keeping it operational, with no prior experience in any of the relevant tools.
  • Built an end-to-end automated data pipeline (Raw Data → InfluxDB → Grafana) ingesting and normalizing high-frequency heterogeneous signals (IP probing results, FHIR endpoint health, and NTP beacon traffic) across distributed hospital systems across the US.
  • Designed tag-and-field schemas in InfluxDB for three structurally incompatible data streams; synchronized data across multiple purpose-specific servers (scanning, backup, consolidation, database) via automated rsync pipelines on hourly cron cycles.
  • Designed system behavior to handle missing, delayed, and conflicting signals, ensuring downstream inference remained stable despite the absence of reliable ground truth across any single stream.
  • Built geospatial dashboards in Grafana with complex query logic and transformations to visualize near real-time infrastructure state and surface outage patterns across hospitals at national scale.

Publications

CRASHCART: Truckin' in a Backup System to Revive Hospitals During Computer Outages
Almog Bar-Yossef, Kartikeyan Subramanyam, Jonathon Guthrie, Alex Gao, Christian Dameff, Jeff Tully, Aaron Schulman
ACM Workshop on Cybersecurity in Healthcare (HealthSec '25) · ARPA-H DIGIHEALS · 2025
FHEmem: A Processing In-Memory Accelerator for Fully Homomorphic Encryption
UCSD System Energy Efficiency Lab (SeeLab)
University of California, San Diego

Patent

Systems, Devices and Methods for a Mobile and Rapidly Deployable Backup Network
Application No. 63/908,287
Type U.S. Provisional Patent
Role Co-Inventor
Filed October 2025
Assignee The Regents of the University of California

Prior Research & Experience

Research Assistant
June 2022 – February 2024
University of California, San Diego
Aviation Network Security (Aerosec Group)
  • Reverse-engineered commercial aircraft network architecture — reconstructed full multi-VLAN topology, firewall rules, and segmentation logic from selectively available system logs and disk images using Python and Bash.
  • Mapped all open ports to running processes; identified structural attack surfaces and segmentation weaknesses in safety-critical aviation network infrastructure.
  • Work is restricted from public disclosure for reasons of national and industrial security.
FHEmem — In-Memory Accelerator for Fully Homomorphic Encryption (SeeLab)
  • Configured and extended the Microsoft SEAL library for encrypted CNN workload execution under CKKS and BFV encryption schemes.
  • Modeled and optimized encrypted data flow within CNN architecture to minimize homomorphic operation count; identified computational bottlenecks per layer.
  • Produced a 20,000-operation benchmark suite (C#, C++) used as primary validation workload for the research paper.
VMaaS Intern — Vulnerability Management as a Service
July 2022 – December 2022
Securin · Albuquerque, NM
  • Developed NLP-based vulnerability classification model trained on 210,000+ CVE records from NVD — 92% prediction accuracy enabling automated threat prioritization at scale.
  • Executed vulnerability assessments across enterprise client environments using Qualys, Nessus, Nexpose, and Ivanti Neurons; conducted penetration testing and reverse engineering.
  • Executed full vulnerability management lifecycle: identification, evaluation, remediation validation, and executive reporting.
Cybersecurity Intern
July 2021 – September 2021
Spire Solutions · Dubai, UAE
  • Deployed and calibrated enterprise security platforms (CyberObserver, Elastic SIEM, AppSpider DAST, InsightVM) for endpoint analytics and dynamic application security testing across client infrastructure.
  • Incorporated and calibrated security solutions to clients' existing IT infrastructure across UAE enterprise environments.

Technical Skills

Security & Infrastructure
Metasploit Wireshark Nessus Qualys Rapid7 InsightVM AppSpider BurpSuite RiskSense NMap Elastic SIEM
Data & Intelligence Platforms
InfluxDB Grafana SQL rsync cron MATLAB Microsoft SEAL
Programming Languages
Python C C++ C# Go Java Rust Bash x86 ASM ARM-64 SystemVerilog PHP HTML/CSS SQL
Cloud & Infrastructure
AWS Docker VMware Linux Windows Server 2022 Active Directory IPSec VPN CBRS/Private 5G VLAN / L2/L3
Certifications
OSCP (in progress) Qualys VMDR Qualys Vulnerability Management
Languages
English — Fluent Hindi — Fluent Urdu — Fluent Punjabi — Fluent Arabic — Intermediate

Education

Bachelor of Science — Computer Science
September 2019 – June 2023
University of California, San Diego
Cum Laude  ·  Major GPA: 3.65 / 4.00  ·  Provost Honors 2023
Cryptography Network Security Systems Architecture Operating Systems Compiler Construction Deep Learning Computer Vision Networked Services

Relevant Coursework & Projects

Computer Security
  • Buffer overflows, side-channel (memory & time), SQL injection, XSS, CSRF
  • Network attacks: social engineering, reverse engineering, netcat, nmap, tcpdump
  • Discovered a previously undiscovered vulnerability in the assignment infrastructure allowing access to other students' submissions
Computer Networks
  • Router — ARP, TCP, UDP, ICMP, longest prefix match, ARP caching (C)
  • Sliding Window Protocol — selective retransmission, cumulative ACK, reliable data transmission (C)
Networked Services
  • SurfStore — Dropbox-like cloud file storage with gRPC (Go)
  • TritonHTTP — HTTP/1.1 web server with pipelining support (Go)
Operating Systems
  • Nachos OS — threading, scheduling, and multiprogramming from scratch (Java)
Systems Architecture
  • Yodie — custom processor for FEC tasks; 9-bit fixed-length ISA (SystemVerilog + Python)
Deep Learning
  • Taxi Travel Time Prediction — MLP Regressor with feature engineering for rush-hour modeling; outperformed LSTM and LightGBM baselines (Python)
Computer Vision
  • Photometric stereo, edge & corner detection, bag-of-words image classification
  • CNN for MNIST — 98% test accuracy; SGD vs. Adam experimentation (Python)
Compiler Construction
  • 'snek' Compiler — Rust compiler generating x86-64 assembly; heap allocation, garbage collection, full expression support
Software Engineering
  • Birds of a Feather — Android app using Nearby API for class-based friend discovery; Agile/Scrum methodology (Java)
Advanced Data Structures
  • DNS Blocker — hash table-based in-memory database (C)
  • Game of Life — fastest implementation in a class of ~250 students (ARM-32)
  • FP Converter, ETL Program (C, ARM-32)
Digital Systems
  • 6-tap LFSR encrypter, traffic signal controller, alarm clock with day/date tracking (SystemVerilog)
Also Completed
  • Cryptography
  • Theory of Computation

Awards & Competitions

Cum Laude — University of California, San Diego
2023
Provost Honors — University of California, San Diego
2023
San Diego Capture the Flag (SDCTF)
2022, 2023
Fastest ARM Assembly implementation — Game of Life, CSE 30 (class of ~250)
2020
High Achiever — Dubai Scholars Private School
2019

Miscellaneous

Clubs & Organizations

  • UCSD Field Hockey Club
  • ACM Cyber
  • Pi Kappa Alpha (PIKE) Alumni

Interests

Pursuing hard tasks every single day. Music: Eric Clapton, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin. Literature: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Osho. Avid NBA fan — Mamba forever.