Abdul Wasey (w453y), Network & Firmware Engineer
Network and firmware engineer working across routing, secure boot, and
infrastructure automation. Based in Mangalore, India. B.Tech from NITK
Surathkal (2022-2026).
Experience
- Firmware Engineer, Quantum Networks (Dec 2025 to present, remote): FIT image verification and verified boot in U-Boot for OpenWrt AP platforms; complete Qualcomm IPQ60xx secure-boot workflow (OEM key provisioning, signed images, QFPROM fuses, PBL-to-Linux verification); hardened firmware-signing pipeline with RSA-PSS and SHA-384; low-level recovery via EDL/Sahara, Firehose, SPI-NOR analysis.
- Intern, Tata Communications (May to Jul 2025, Pune): multi-link WAN aggregation and failover engine; clustered virtualization on enterprise rack servers with redundant SAN storage and multipath I/O; VLAN-segmented management, cluster, and storage networks; structured failover validation.
- Systems Engineer and Lead, IRIS NITK (May 2023 to May 2026): JWT auth via custom-compiled NGINX module + Rails; Zabbix/Grafana monitoring with Discord alerting; Dockerized GitLab Enterprise migration with automated NAS backups; zero-downtime migration of 40+ containers and 15+ VMs to a high-availability Proxmox cluster.
- Research Intern, NITK Surathkal (Apr to Jul 2024, supervised by Prof. Mohit P. Tahiliani): complete NAC testbed with PacketFence, OPNsense, 802.1X, and VLAN segmentation.
Projects
- Self-Hosted Infrastructure Platform: personal two-node Proxmox VE cluster with ZFS and shared block storage over multipath iSCSI, hosting 30+ services. OPNsense at the edge, a containerized NGINX reverse proxy with automated TLS fronting Matrix Synapse, Mailcow, Immich, Vaultwarden, Guacamole, and a Jellyfin media stack, plus layered Pi-hole and dnsdist DNS.
- IPv6 Deployment at NITK: APNIC-funded dual-stack rollout (SLAAC + DHCPv6) across campus VLANs; DHCPv6 snooping, RA-flood mitigation, RDNSS fixes for Android.
- Staging-Server (IRIS NITK): Django web app that deploys Dockerized apps to isolated staging environments with dynamic subdomains, live logs, and a browser terminal.
- ngx-http-auth-jwt-gateway: centralized JWT auth gateway for NGINX with Google OAuth 2.0.
- tg-archiver: containerized Telegram media archiver built on Telethon/MTProto with resumable, deduplicated downloads.
- personal-portfolio: this site: React, TypeScript, Node.js, Docker, NGINX, Gmail-integrated contact backend.
Open Source
- ngx-http-auth-jwt-module (TeslaGov): PR #152 merged in v2.4.0: runtime-variable support for auth_jwt_enabled enabling conditional JWT enforcement.
- Proxmox VE bug #6224: diagnosed GUI hang from blocking SMART queries on USB SSDs; contributed to upstream timeout patch review.
Talks
- Securing IPv6 Networks with Firewalls (IIESOC / NITK workshop)
- WAN Aggregation using OpenMPTCProuter (FOSS United Mangalore, 2024)
- Introduction to Self-Hosting with FOSS Tools (FOSS United Mangalore, 2025)
- Open Source Monitoring in Action (FOSS United Mangalore, 2025)
Community
- Founder and moderator of r/dockerCE, a community-run Docker subreddit.
- Writes technical guides on Reddit as u/w453y (Proxmox cluster-to-standalone conversion, DNS over TLS for Pi-hole); active in r/Proxmox, r/selfhosted, r/homelab, and r/pihole.
- Keybase-verified identity across GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Hacker News.
Certifications
- Google Cybersecurity Professional Certificate (2023)
- Oracle OCI Certified Architect Associate (2026)
- Oracle OCI Certified DevOps Professional (2026)
Contact
Email: awasey8905@gmail.com · Phone: +91 70903 44713 ·
GitHub: github.com/w453y ·
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/w453y ·
More: w453y.me/llms.txt