Shruti Lohani’s Journey from Telecommunications Engineer to IoT Security Researcher

by Marcelle Santos

Shruti Lohani will walk into a networking event and ask everyone what they’re working on, then go home and Google what they said to find out more. “It’s almost as if I want to be a newspaper. I’m curious about everything.”

Her curiosity and openness to learning from everyone got her where she is today: Northeastern’s Master of Science in Cyber-Physical Systems with a concentration in Internet of Things (IoT). (While Shruti’s cohort is the last to attend at the Silicon Valley campus, the program continues at the Boston campus.)

“I feel that everyone I’ve met and worked with contributed to my learning journey. From the teacher at school who told me I was good at math to the college seniors who told me to contact professors researching the fields I was interested in,” she says.

Talking to people wasn’t always easy for her. Up until high school, she was an introvert. It was in college—where she majored in Electronics and Communications Engineering—that her interest in research and development motivated her to try to connect with others with similar interests. “I was studying in a place that was rural and noticed not everyone had good internet connectivity there. That was something that I wanted to think about and improve,” she says.

To figure out how to make the internet faster and more accessible, she had to bounce ideas off teachers, classmates, and industry professionals. They helped her problem-solve—and gave her career advice. One of them told her not to get a job after graduation but go into research instead.

Discovering her passion

Shruti was intrigued—but true to her vocation, she decided to do a small experiment before committing to two years of Master’s studies. She reached out to a professor who was researching security in telecommunications and asked if she could intern with him for a couple of months.

As it turns out, she felt right at home working alongside Ph.D. and post-doc students. “It’s so different from being an undergrad student where you’re like, ‘I want to get a high-paying job at XYZ,’” she says. “Ph.D. students study for four or five years, day and night, just to accomplish one simulation and get an efficiency of .08 seconds.”

The idea of working diligently toward something larger than herself inspired her. She knew then that she could, and would, become a researcher.

Her previous work and grades guaranteed her an academic excellence scholarship at EURECOM, a top engineering school in France, where she enrolled in the Master of Mobile Computing Systems. She received the LABEX grant from UCN-SOPHIA for conducting research while there.

Finding confidence

With the move to France, she became a researcher, and, later, an extrovert.

It was a process. Before arriving in Nice, where she stayed for nearly five years, she feared the worst: “I used to read news about people getting murdered because of racial hate and I was scared. I just wanted to be accepted.”

To her surprise, she was. Grocery store workers helped her find the items she needed when she didn’t speak a word of French. Acquaintances made sure she made it home safe. Professors made her feel as if she belonged.

“When you are coming from a fear mindset and people help you and are nice to you, you realize you’re not alone. That’s how I got the confidence to reach out to anyone without fear of what might happen. To say what I have in my heart knowing it will be fine.”

A big project

Once she got her bearings, she began working on a personal IoT project which landed her an internship with one of her professors, a leading researcher in communication systems.

For the internship, she spent three months developing the critical components of a smart cyber-physical environment for Industry 4.0, as part of a big project involving research institutions in two countries.

She worked mostly on her own because her professor had to attend several conferences in Europe that summer. “He let me use his office so I could concentrate on my research. That was very special and felt like a reward in the form of his trust.”

The room Shruti worked in was on floor -3, where all the Ph.D. and postdoctoral students worked. She also had access to floor -4, which housed all the machines, Raspberry Pi servers, and CPOs.

A summer underground

While the idea of spending an entire summer underground with a difficult problem to solve may not be everyone’s cup of tea, Shruti was excited.

She worked every day from 9 to 5 — some days, she stayed until 7 pm. She spent the first month just reading research papers. In the second month, she managed to write the specifications for a prototype. In the third month, she developed and presented her idea to a group of professors and industry professionals.

“I was trembling. Implementation was the part that I was really anxious about because you never know. You have this idea in your head, and you think you know how it’s going to work, but when you implement it, it can turn out totally different. With software, you never know.”

She succeeded — to the point where her name was included in EURECOM’s hall of fame for her invaluable contribution to the Smart Cyber-Physical Environment For the Industry of the Future (SCHEIF) project. The platform she built is still being used today. “I’m really proud of my work because I developed an end-to-end product. It’s my baby.”

A taste of the industry

Before graduating, Shruti worked as a full-stack development intern at the French multinational telecommunications corporation Orange. Her time there helped her realize that industry experience was the perfect complement to her academic research.

“My internship gave me insight into other techniques and working styles. Orange’s working system, for example, included extensive market research, and after deployment, the system of handling the security was very impressive.”

In her next job, at IoT security and solutions company NEXESS, she got “the best of both worlds” by working full-time as a computer scientist in their research and development lab.

Building tools for cybersecurity

There, she had the opportunity to dive deep into a topic she was increasingly interested in: cybersecurity. She read newsletters and research papers, attended webinars, and reached out to professionals in the field.

One of them collaborates with her on a tool for protecting smart-home devices from getting hacked. (Specifically, the tool was “for the monitoring and mitigation of DNS rebinding attacks.” They presented it at DEFCON28 — the presentation is available here.)

The experience of building a cybersecurity tool gave Shruti a new direction. She knew now that she wanted to keep learning about IoT and cybersecurity. She knew that she wanted to build something concrete that she could implement on a large scale. She also knew that she was ready to move to an English-speaking country with active research in those fields — preferably one where winters were mild.

A new path

Her realizations led her to Northeastern’s Master of Science in Cyber-Physical Systems, where coursework is combined with research and industry experience, and where it’s possible to explore cybersecurity in depth. That she was able to study at the Silicon Valley campus in San Jose—where it’s warm throughout most of the year—was an added bonus.

A year into the program, she has attended several information security conferences and workshops, become a member of the Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS) community, and won the Google CTF competition.

She’s about to start her eight-month co-op as a Security Engineer with a leading Machine Vision Industry 4.0 organization and is looking forward to the next WiCyS conference, which she will be attending on a full scholarship.

As she continues to enhance her security skills to meet industry requirements, she knows exactly what she’s working toward: “I want something that combines industry and research, IoT and security, exposure in scale, and where I’m not just an employee but someone who can contribute something new.”

She’ll keep reaching out to people and learning from them until she finds it.