About Me

Hi, I’m Darpan Basnet, a Cyber Operations sophomore at Dakota State University, currently interning at Black Hills Information Security (BHIS) as part of the Security Operations (SecOps) Triage Team.
In my role, I investigate and respond to alerts across Windows, Linux, and cloud environments such as Azure and AWS.

🧭 Experience

Previously, I worked as a Student Security Analyst at DSU’s Cyber Security Operations Center (CSOC), where I focused on log collection, detection engineering, threat intelligence integration, and automation in SIEM platforms like Elastic Stack and Microsoft Defender XDR.

🏫 Activities

Outside of work, I’m the leader of the CTF Club at DSU, where we host weekly meetings to explore cybersecurity topics, solve challenges, and compete in national CTF competitions.

🔬 Research

I was awarded a Student Research Initiative (SRI) to conduct research for six months with my chosen faculty mentor Dr. Varghese Vaidyan, alongside my research partner Anshu Bista.

Our project, titled Hardware Timing Side-Channel Attacks on Quantum Control Electronics, focuses on studying vulnerabilities in the classical control components of quantum computers.
Classical control architectures are integral to quantum computers, enabling the initialization, manipulation, and measurement of qubits, as well as error correction.

In this project, we will prototype a quantum computer control architecture on a microcontroller and/or FPGA (field-programmable gate array) platform and investigate how execution time may vary depending on the quantum operations initiated.
By systematically studying and characterizing these timing variations, we aim to assess how sensitive information might be leaked through hardware timing side-channel attacks and explore potential mitigation strategies.

⚙️ Interests

Beyond research and work, I love building homelabs using tools like Docker to simulate real-world SOC investigations, adversary activity, and detection engineering workflows.

🎥 Coffee & CTF

I also run a YouTube channel, Coffee & CTF, where I share content related to capture-the-flag challenges and cybersecurity learning.