• Thomas Cerruti, 20, a rising junior and linebacker on the Muhlenberg College football team who intends to declare a major in computer science, is spending his summer conducting research on campus. Cerruti, a graduate of St. Joseph’s Prep, is checking for vulnerabilities in some of the most common smart plugs available online, trying to control them using code instead of the apps that are meant to control the plugs.
Q: Why did you decide to pursue this experience?
I know I want to go into computer science and I want to have a career maybe in cybersecurity, so this is definitely a very good project to get my feet wet and understand that field. [I learned summer research was an option] through speaking with my professor, [Assistant Professor of Computer Science Proyash Podder], and my friend Mick O’Malley ’27. They definitely opened the doors to the research, telling me how good it is to just try to understand more about the cybersecurity field in a smaller environment, on a smaller project. They both reassured me that it might be hard but it’s worth it because you’re going to get a good experience out of it.
Q: What has this research experience looked like for you?
I’m in the lab every day because this project is really hands-on. Early in the project, I had to capture the communication between the smart plug and the app on my phone. Now, I’m trying to replicate the communication on my end by writing code without going through an app. I have a way to contact and communicate with all the plugs as of right now. Some of them have some form of encryption where it is sort of hard to decrypt it, but it’s not impossible. My research involves seeing which ones are encrypted, which ones are not, and how easy or hard it is for someone to be able to create code and then hack into and control your plug.
Q: How have your Muhlenberg experiences helped you in this work?
I’ve taken a lot of classes dealing with computer science, so that gave me a good baseline of understanding coding and different protocols within the internet. I use an app called Wireshark, which captures the communication between the smart plug and the app, and it all revolves around internet protocols, so taking those classes obviously helped me with a background so I understand what I’m looking at and understand what I’m doing. ••
