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Abhinav Raj seated at a desk, one hand at his temple, looking at the camera
Front-page clipping. Tap it for the security desk.
Security research · Product engineering · Applied AI

Abhinav Raj

I break into the part of an app that decides who is allowed to do what, then I write the fix. I also ship products of my own. Researching since March 2026, Bugcrowd global Top 50 in June, July and September 2026.

  • 5Products live
  • Top 50Bugcrowd, June, July & September 2026
  • 27Verified credentials
  • 4Research papers
About

I started by building products
Security changed how I read them

For a few years I shipped things: a file workspace, a model gateway, a subscription tracker, a race-weekend app, a disposable mailbox. Each one taught me how software behaves once real people and real traffic arrive.

In March 2026 I started security research on bug bounty programs. The work is mostly reading: how a request proves who it is, what the server checks before it acts, and where the two drift apart. Most of what I report sits in authorization, authentication and business logic, not in exotic exploits.

That reading now runs backwards into what I build. Every feature gets the questions I would ask a target: who can call this, with which object, and what happens if the steps arrive out of order.

Security research

  • Authorization, IDOR/BOLA and access control
  • Authentication, OAuth 2.0 and OIDC flows
  • APIs, business logic, SSRF, XSS and unsafe rendering
  • Source-code review of exposed bundles and open components

Product engineering

  • Frontends, APIs, auth and storage on Cloudflare
  • Five products live at their own domains
  • Security review as part of the design step, not after it
  • Web, Android and iOS surfaces

Applied AI

  • Clex AI: one OpenAI-compatible endpoint across providers
  • Driped: deterministic parsing first, a model only for the hard cases
  • trgt: race notes generated from live session snapshots
  • Model output treated as untrusted input
Late city edition The Build Journal Extra

Security desk · Bugcrowd leaderboard

Global Top 50, three times over

First program in March 2026. Ranked among Bugcrowd’s global Top 50 researchers in June, again in July, and again in September.

Abhinav Raj, printed as a halftone
A. Raj · at the desk

Most of what gets reported sits in authorization, authentication and business logic: a server acting on an identifier without checking who owns it, a flow that can be reordered, a login that links identities too loosely.

Every test runs between accounts created for it, with invented data, and stops at the smallest request that proves the problem.

  • Top 50 · Jun 2026
  • Top 50 · Jul 2026
  • Top 50 · Sep 2026
Continued on the security desk

Current focus

How I work

Motion desk · Reel 01 · 26 seconds

The journal, in motion

Everything in this film is drawn live in your browser, frame by frame. Tap it to pause, drag the bar to scrub, move over it and it moves with you.

The five
products

Five live products. Five case studies. Swipe the desk.

All builds and papers
Closing note

Building something that has to hold up?

I test systems the way I want mine tested: scoped, careful, and written up so the fix is obvious. I ship products too, so I know what a report costs the team that has to act on it.