recu.
A personal space for thinking
I am Nithik R. This website is a digital notebook. What you will find here are the selective learnings I chose to record, forming a documentary of my growth over time.
About Me
Featured Posts
Gradient of Thought
Why do certain ideas seem almost inevitable once we begin thinking about them, while others remain difficult to reach? This essay explores the possibility that thought has a landscape: a space of concepts in which some ideas are easier to reach than others. I speculate about conceptual spaces, the dynamics of thought and intellectual originality.
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Cryptanalysis of a Quantum Public Key Encryption Scheme
I explain my cryptanalysis of a public key encryption scheme that uses a four-states quantum public key to encrypt a qubit message. This scheme was described in Zhixin Liu et al 2022 Phys. Scr. 97 045102
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Privilege Escalation via Buffer Overflow: Case Study on Narnia
In this article, I go over my journey from understanding memory layouts to achieving privilege escalation through a buffer overflow exploit, using OverTheWire Narnia as a case study.
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Recent Posts
Gradient of Thought
Why do certain ideas seem almost inevitable once we begin thinking about them, while others remain difficult to reach? This essay explores the possibility that thought has a landscape: a space of concepts in which some ideas are easier to reach than others. I speculate about conceptual spaces, the dynamics of thought and intellectual originality.
Read moreCryptanalysis of a Quantum Public Key Encryption Scheme
I explain my cryptanalysis of a public key encryption scheme that uses a four-states quantum public key to encrypt a qubit message. This scheme was described in Zhixin Liu et al 2022 Phys. Scr. 97 045102
Read morePrivilege Escalation via Buffer Overflow: Case Study on Narnia
In this article, I go over my journey from understanding memory layouts to achieving privilege escalation through a buffer overflow exploit, using OverTheWire Narnia as a case study.
Read more
Understanding Modular Binomials in Cryptography
In this article, I go over a toy model of modular binomials and try to demonstrate how algebraic structure or patterns in a cryptographic system can inherently break secrecy.
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The Cake is a Matrix: A CitadelCTF 2025 Challenge
In this writeup I’ll go through my thought process and solution for the challenge “The Cake is a Matrix,” which was a part of the CitadelCTF 2025 by Cryptonite. This challenge was created by goosbo.
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Frequency Analysis on Repeating-key XOR
Repeating-key XOR is a simple, yet good exercise to learn how structure betrays secrecy. I’ll walk through the basic idea behind the encryption and how it can be broken: the intuition, the practical steps I thought of. I’ll also add a mention to a simple cipher I built months back, the Bit Flip Cipher and why the same weakness applies.
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Bit Flip Cipher: My First Attempt at Making a Cipher
A few months back, I found myself with an idea: what if I tried making my own cipher, just for fun? I hadn’t studied cryptography at all at that point, but I wanted to see how far I could go. That’s how Bit Flip Cipher came into existence.
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Fibonacci LFSR: How it works and How to Attack it
The Fibonacci Linear Feedback Shift Register is a classic example of a simple pseudo-random generator. It is often introduced in the study of stream ciphers and cryptanalysis because, while it can produce long pseudo-random sequences, its linearity also makes it vulnerable to attacks.
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