About
When I was a kid, I used to dream a lot about science, space, and life beyond Earth. I was a huge fan of NASA missions to Mars like Pathfinder, and absolutely amazed by Voyager I and II probes. I even sent letters to NASA, Pentagon, and SETI institute - and to my surprise, they all replied with incredible letters, mission materials, and photos. At that time, it was unimaginable to have access to all that information; even with a dial-up modem, you couldn't get that kind of material publicly.
In secondary school, I studied as an Electronics Technician and then ended up as an Informatics Technician. At that time, I was a huge fan of ham radio, computer viruses, phreaking, and making music with computers and recording it to cassette tape. At my school "PIO IX", I met Miguel San Martin, an ex-student who works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was part of many Mars missions. He became a fundamental inspiration for something I thought impossible: "working in the space field." Every year, he would come back to show us the missions he worked on, how they operated, and all the crazy engineering challenges they faced.
During these years, I developed a deep love for radio, music, and computer security. I took a course to become a licensed radio operator, and I still remember the thrill of talking with people at Base Marambio in Antarctica.
The under tech world was always there. It pulled me in through Hackemate meetings and then 2600 meetings at the mythical SJ05 bar in Buenos Aires. There, I dove more into computer viruses and security, meeting amazing people in the underground H/P/V/C world. One of my best friends from those days is Powertech. I met him at SJ05 bar using a frequency scanner. Some time later we had fun setting up an antenna on my parents roof to intercept ambulance pager messages at Down Town Flowers, also exploring logins using telnet on NASA nodes found through a boring tracert command using a tiny Sony VAIO laptop and a slow as hell dial up connection with probably someone else's phone line. Lovely days.
While building my career in informatics, I was also going deeper into the cybersecurity world. At Ekoparty Security Conference, I joined LockpickAR, where we researched biometric authentication methods and classic lockpicking techniques. We discovered ways to clone fingerprints using dental silicone and metacrilate glue (la gotita), publishing a security assessment of widely-used ZK software fingerprint readers that were in almost every public office and government place in Argentina. We ended up presenting this at OWASP Day FING Uruguay to a bunch of nerds, talking about the upcoming government project called "SIBIOS" and its dangers.
Informatics, hacking and radio fun with SDRs was present too these years. I participated in many editions of Ekoparty Security Conference, Nerdearla, and in 2600s and Sysarmy meetings too. I later became IT lead and engineer for many years at a visual effects boutique company, working on software and specific hardware like distributed renderfarms, storage and inter-company networking, for many other visual effects and advertising companies.
Teaching was also a big part of my career. I taught extension courses and programs at Universidad Nacional de San Martin, such as "Design for 3D Printing".
I had the luck of traveling to MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to do a short program about "Advances in Imaging: VR-AR, Machine Learning and Self Driving Cars" with Prof. Ramesh Raskar (MIT Media Lab), and "Additive Manufacturing: from the 3D Printing to the factory floor" with Prof. John Hart (Desktop Metal). In 2019, I finished the "Additive Manufacturing for Innovative Design and Production" course of MIT by Prof. John Hart.
The experience at MIT gave me an amazing opportunity to reach a milestone in my career. I was part of a once-in-a-lifetime project where we saved Valentino's life with 3D printing, modifying an FDM printer to produce a medical grade splint for his bronchomalacia. This work was later open sourced in a public paper. At that time I worked as New Image Technology Area's Technology Manager at IAMK TAREA IIPC, and as 3D Printing Researcher at Lab3Bio, Labocluster, School of Science and Technology, both at Universidad Nacional de San Martin.
During the world pandemic in 2020, I launched Patagon Space, creating a network of space enthusiasts and security professionals working on aerospace projects, and also interviewing aerospace engineers, researchers, cybersecurity professionals, etc. This ended up as an active community in Argentina of nerds that love space. We are now working on space security related projects.
In recent years, I've focused more on informatics and computer security. On the tech side, my journey led me to the fascinating world of satellite security, starting with one in an "only reception" mode, then came a break but a great run at GLOBANT, where I dove into data and infrastructure with Google Cloud technologies at their CloudOps studio. Then came an amazing opportunity to join the cybersecurity team at Satellogic, an earth observation satellite manufacturer and operator, working alongside security gurus like Gera Richarte, Beto Solino, Emiliano Kargieman, and many other ex-CORE security members.
Finally, I joined the Stratosphere IPS laboratory at CTU (Czech Technical University), where I'm working on my master's thesis in satellite security as part of my Cyberdefense and Cybersecurity Master's program. At the same time, with our AsturExplorers team, we recently participated in NASA's SpaceApps Challenge, where our project Landsat Connect made it to the global top 40 finalists! Later on, I came back to Satellogic as Incident Response and Threat Intel Engineer.
What comes next? Who knows!