Max Bleakley

Selected work

Networking Infrastructure Defensive Offensive Software Analysis
Homelab Networking Infrastructure Defensive No No No
T-Pot honeypot No Infrastructure Defensive No No Analysis
bineng No No No No Software Analysis
Stego cracker No No No Offensive Software No
C2 server Networking No No Offensive Software No
What each project covers. Select a project to jump to it.

T-Pot honeypot deployment

Role
Head of Deployment, Head of Project Management (group project)
Stack
T-Pot, Debian, Intel NUC, Elastic and Kibana, MITRE ATT&CK

Our team exposed a T-Pot honeypot to the internet for seven days and captured more than 2.5 million events.

  • Built and deployed the sensor on an Intel NUC running Debian.
  • Ran the project plan and deployment schedule for the group.
  • Visualised the telemetry in Kibana and mapped observed behaviour to MITRE ATT&CK techniques.
  • Wrote a Gibbs reflective analysis of the project for the Professional Practice module.

bineng: static analysis engine for Linux binaries

Stack
Rust, standard library only
In progress

A static analyser for ELF64 binaries, which I am building to learn Rust and binary analysis together.

  • Complete ELF64 loader: ELF header, program headers, section headers with two-pass name resolution, and symbol tables.
  • Hardened against malformed input with a corruption test suite, byte-flip fuzzing, a corpus walk and #![forbid(unsafe_code)].
  • Output checked against readelf on dynamically and statically linked test binaries.
  • No external crates until a phase needs one.
  • Next: an ordered pass pipeline (format, imports, strings, entropy, disassembly, threat scoring) and a command-line interface.

The pass architecture is adapted from an open-source reference project.

Parallel steganography cracker

Stack
Rust, rayon, clap, tempfile

A command-line tool that brute-forces passphrases on steganographic files, written while working through CTF challenges.

  • Tests candidates in parallel across all cores with rayon.
  • Confirms a hit by validating magic bytes in the extracted output.
  • Writes an audit log of each run.

Small C2 server

Stack
Python, sockets
Team
Built with one collaborator

Developed a small command-and-control server for isolated lab use, built to understand adversary infrastructure from the defender’s side.

  • Protocol designed in layers: transport, session, encoding and encryption.
  • TCP listener, agent check-in protocol and beacon loop.
  • Task queue driven from an operator CLI.
  • Scoped and documented with the Computer Misuse Act 1990 in mind.