Hardik Shah
Principal Malware Reverse Engineer at Palo Alto Networks
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolHardik Shah is a Principal Malware Reverse Engineer with over two decades of hands-on cyber security experience and a proven track record at industry leaders including Sophos, McAfee and Symantec. He blends deep vulnerability research and fuzzing expertise—contributing to prominent tools like the WinAFL fork for Windows fuzzing—with leadership in building and mentoring high‑performance threat research teams from the ground up. Hardik has discovered 50+ vulnerabilities across Microsoft and open-source projects, earned multiple MSRC recognitions, filed patents, and driven product improvements across IPS, EDR/XDR and NDR platforms. A sought-after speaker and author, his research has attracted mainstream media coverage and informed product strategy and customer protections at scale. He’s equally comfortable in crisis-driven incident response and long-term R&D, with a knack for turning obscure exploit analysis into practical defenses and IP.
9 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Rajiv Gandhi Proudyogiki VishwavidyalayaB.SC., Computer Science, B.SC., Computer Science at Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya12, Maths, 12, Maths at R.R.M.B.Guj. Higher Secondary School, Indore
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
1answer
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Github Skills (15)
afl-fuzz10
c1710
windows10
fuzzing10
c1110
security10
exception-handling9
debug9
debugging9
instrumentation8
dynamic8
shared-memory8
dynamic-analysis8
coredump6
fuzzer6
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
googleprojectzero/winafl
Jan 2019 - Jun 2021
A fork of AFL for fuzzing Windows binaries
Role in this project:
Security Engineer
Security EngineerContributions:5 reviews, 21 commits, 18 PRs in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Hardik primarily focused on enhancing the functionality and robustness of the WinAFL fuzzer, a tool for Windows binary fuzzing. They made significant changes to the crash reporting mechanism, incorporating exception codes into crash file names and improving the handling of different crash types, and added support for shared memory. Additionally, the user addressed specific issues within the fuzzer's operation, such as corruption in fuzzer statistics, adding error output and updating the code base. These updates improved the fuzzing process and the analysis of crashes.
windowssecurityafl-fuzzfuzzingbinaries
hardik05/hardik05.github.io
Dec 2019 - Nov 2022
Contributions:78 commits, 13 PRs, 152 pushes in 2 years 11 months
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