Home on Michael Noguera

About Me

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Hi! I’m Michael Noguera (he/him), a first-year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I work with Professors Aishwarya Ganesan and Ram Alagappan in the Distributed And Storage Systems Laboratory (DASSL). I completed my undergraduate degree in Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May 2025, advised by Professor Xiangyao Yu. Before switching to systems, I worked with Prof. Rahul Chatterjee on privacy and security, supported by the WISCERS program and a Sophomore Research Fellowship.

List of WISCERS 2024 Faculty Mentors

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I participated in Wisconsin Science and Computing Emerging Research Stars (WISCERS) as part of the 2022-23 cohort and really enjoyed the experience. Even if you’re uncertain, you should definetly apply! See the program site here and apply here. I remember that one part of the application that confused me when I was applying was deciding who I wanted to work with from the long list of faculty mentors. Hopefully this makes that a little easier.

Exploring the Anshel-Anshel-Goldfeld Key Exchange System

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Final project for CS 642 (Information Security) at UW-Madison, Fall 2022 (sophomore year). Two UPL friends and I implemented the Anshel-Anshel-Goldfeld key exchange protocol and wrote our term paper about it. The Anshel-Anshel-Goldfeld Key Exchange protocol is interesting because it may be the closest thing I’ve seen to Hollywood cryptography, yet it really works and might even be useful in some situations. AAG is an alternative to Diffie-Hellman based in group theory.

A CS Course Map for Incoming UW-Madison Students

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hugo Shortcode: License Badges on Code Blocks

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favorite features of the static site generator Hugo is “shortcodes”, which allow you to abstract away chunks of website content and invoke them from your markdown posts. The Hugo community has taken to sharing their custom shortcodes online, which I found really helpful while learning how to write them. Thus here is one of my own, inspired by Jiri De Jagere’s custom collapsible code blocks. Examples You can specify a specific license to be shown with the green tag and scale icon.

Copyright Notice

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Copyright © 2020 Michael Noguera. All rights reserved. Reuse Code snippets: I give you permission to reproduce code included in my articles under the terms of the MIT License. This applies code snippets that I publish on this site if no other license is provided, but not to the source code of this site itself. Copyright (c) 2020 Michael Noguera Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

AP Chem: Spectrophotometric Mixture Analysis

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

To determine the composition of a mystery mixture consisting of various types of food coloring, I wrote this program that works with Vernier’s Spectral Analysis software.

Zybooks Autoplay

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 12:00:44 -0500

Zybooks online textbooks include animated activities that you must watch to completion. This script makes them auto-play at double speed when you load the page.

TJCTF 2019: All The Zips

Sat, 06 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Forensics - 20 points 140 zips in the zip, all protected by a dictionary word. This was the first zip file challenge that I attempted. Afterwards, I have noticed that almost every CTF competition has at least one of these. A pile of zip files is provided, and one of them is supposed to contain the flag. Being new to this, I first researched the tools I would need, and found that the fcrackzip utility is the easiest to use.

Reverse Engineering the Wisconsin Driver Practice Test

Thu, 04 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Note from a future me, after I took the test: It’s pretty easy but it tries to trick you. Glance over these questions because they were good to know. The Problem I am currently taking Drivers’ Ed, and was told to use the WI DMV Driver Practice Test app to help study for the permit test. The only problem: I didn’t have a phone. It seems like I am not the only one that finds issues with the provided mobile app.

Hack This Site: Basic Challenges

Mon, 03 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Basic 1: HTML Comment This level is what we call “The Idiot Test”, if you can’t complete it, don’t give up on learning all you can, but, don’t go begging to someone else for the answer, thats one way to get you hated/made fun of. Enter the password and you can continue. Very simple. Look at the webpage’s html source. Find the line that reads:  This comment gives you the answer.

How To: Blind SQL Injection, HSCTF 2018: Password

Thu, 19 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Here are some rudimentary notes on how I solved the challenge ‘Password’ for HSCTF 2018. The puzzle gave a mock-up social media website with a login form, and asked that you retrieve Keith’s password. I figured out that the login form was vulnerable to SQL injection after trying the password "or true--" logged me in as user FirstName LastName. My go-to generic queries you can try to see if a site is vulnerable to this attack are…

Making backups of hard drives using the bash utility “dd”

Wed, 18 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I had an old corrupted hard drive that I needed to back up so that it could be reused.

CV

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Available upon request, but I don’t have a current version handy to post here. Please email me at “contact” at this site.

Projects

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000