Starting in 2017, Zino has worked on several academic and independent cybersecurity research both nationally and internationally. Zino also received the BlackHat Academic Scholarship and was named a Society of American Military Engineers Scholar. In recent years, Zino has worked with security-focused organizations in the policy and arts space and as a representative member of organizations that serve of the boards and working groups of the United Nations and the OECD.
In 2024, Zino joined the advisory board of The Hacking Games (founded by Daan Dia, Fergus Hay) alongside others like Chris Wysopal, Marcus Hutchins, Zara Perumal, Stéphane Duguin, Tim Orchard, and Daniel Kelley. See the full community here:
Our Communities - The Hacking Games
As a second year undergraduate student, Zino worked on the DARPA funded RIOT- IoT Security Project of the Columbia University IRT Laboratory under Professor Henning Schulzrinne. Zino joined the research project as a cyber threat model developer creating and reverse engineering malicious scripts to test intrusion detection in IoT devices. The project involved deep understanding of DHCP options, ONOS controller usage, and management of simulated (Raspberry PI copies of real IoT devices), virtual (VM based), and real (IoT devices and physical switches) versions of network testbeds.
Initial independent work involved research on the weaponization of artificial intelligence titled “Machine Learning as a Tool for Societal Exploitation: A Summary on the Current and Future State of Affairs.” It was presented in Defcon China.
Later work expanded into the world of private blockchain systems, including research titled “Targeted Attacks on the Blockchain (Hyperledger).” The talk served as a window into the possibilities of attack using systems such as the Hyperledger Fabric, specifically by creating a (simulated) directed attack towards a proposed corporation using a Hyperledger-derived framework in order to provide some insight into the dangers of high reliance on a single, overly trusted, and relatively new system.
The research analyzed potential adoptions of blockchain systems in financial and technological sectors (from Goldman Sachs to IBM and the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC)) combined with a brief consideration of different blockchain "types," including various forms of contracts and trust relationships such as transaction families. From the understanding of these distinct implementations and their weaknesses, the attack simulation explored various attack propositions and combinations, including malicious chaincode, language-based vulnerabilities, RATs, log injection, and container-based escalation in non-trusted nodes in the case of Kubernetes and Docker.
It was presented in multiple countries, including Japan and South Korea in a further development.
InfoSec Talks in Tokyo : CODE BLUE
In 2019, Zino worked jointly with the Columbia University Law School, the School of International and Public Affairs, and the Fu Foundation of Engineering and Applied Sciences on the paper titled “Addressing Router (In)Security at Scale.” The paper addressed router insecurity and provided recommendations on a national level.