Yash Parikh

By the numbers

The story so far

1. 2021 – 2023

   It started with a club

   In 7th grade I joined CyberAegis, a student-run cybersecurity club in San Diego. Most of the work turned out to be patient and unglamorous: get handed a broken Windows or Linux machine, find what is wrong with it, and fix it before the clock runs out, with a scoring engine keeping count.

   I liked it a lot more than I expected to. Our middle school team won CyberPatriot nationals in 2022, then again in 2023 with me as captain, and took the SoCal Cyber Cup both years.

   CyberAegis →CyberPatriot, middle school →SoCal Cyber Cup →

2. 2023 – 2025

   From competing to teaching

   High school competitions got harder, and I started building the practice for them myself. In January of 9th grade I put together a team for MITRE's embedded CTF, where you write secure firmware for a microcontroller and then attack everyone else's. We came 2nd among high school teams in a field that's mostly college teams.

   As CyberAegis's VP of Windows, I began designing its practice rounds: 7–8 connected Windows and Linux machines with a domain controller, web servers and databases, which I then attack live while students defend them. Around the same time I joined CyberCEO, where we teach cyber safety to elementary schoolers and senior citizens, more than 1,600 kids so far.

   In 2025 my team won the CyberPatriot Open Division national championship. I was the domain-controller security lead, defending Active Directory against professional red-teamers for four hours, and my teammates voted me MVP.

   MITRE eCTF →CyberCEO →CyberPatriot Open Division →Tutoring CyberPatriot teams →

3. 2024 – 2025

   Building things people use

   Waiting to cross the border is a normal part of life in San Diego, so I led a team of five building CrossWise, an app that predicts wait times at two ports of entry from live CBP, weather and maps data.

   Then my CS teacher hired me to run infrastructure for the district's computer science program: cloud Linux desktops for 200+ students who don't have their own computers, a migration of the whole platform to a new domain, and training for eight teachers. I also deleted a production database once, recovered it, and rewrote the migration tooling so that it couldn't happen again. I learned more from that than from anything that went smoothly.

   Along the way: the software and wiki for Del Norte's iGEM team, which won a Gold Medal, and a steady stream of small tools I built to fix my own annoyances.

   CrossWise →Poway Unified internship →iGEM →Small tools →

4. 2025 – 2026

   Asking research questions

   At COSMOS at UC Santa Cruz, I tested whether an LLM flying a drone makes consistent safety calls. Across 200 simulated weather scenarios its decisions flipped up to 75% of the time, and the surprise was that the instability showed up in ordinary, middling weather, not in storms.

   That got me interested in how autonomous systems get attacked. With my friend Mihir Bapat, and no mentor, I spent 11th grade building a two-stage model that catches forged vehicle-to-vehicle messages (96% accuracy) and names the attack. It won a First Award at the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair, went to the state fair, and was published at IEEE ICCNCT.

   COSMOS drone safety →V2X intrusion detection →

5. Summer 2026

   Two labs in one summer

   At the San Diego Supercomputer Center, I worked on finding and stripping personal information out of 1,400+ support tickets so future AI tools could learn from them safely. Three weeks in, I flew to Boston for BU's RISE program (85 interns chosen from 3,800+ applicants) to work in the Security Lab.

   There I built VibeAuthBench, which asks AI coding agents to add "Sign in with Google" to real open-source apps and then checks whether it works and what it broke. Only 5 of 30 runs produced a working sign-in, and 163 of 172 security findings were in the code the agents had just written. The poster was accepted at IEEE ACSAC 2026.

   VibeAuthBench →SDSC REHS →

6. Now

   Senior year

   I'm President of CyberAegis, which now has 100+ students across three schools. At SDSC I'm building AI agents that help researchers use the supercomputer and measuring how much safety you give up by letting them change things instead of only reading. With a friend I co-founded an AI-safety project track in our school's CS program, and I write its grant applications. And VibeAuthBench is on the poster program at ACSAC in Los Angeles this December.

   SDSC AI agents →Open Coding Society AI →Nighthawk Ambassador →