Omar Merroun

I’m Omar Merroun, an engineering student at IMT Atlantique based in Rennes. My focus is security engineering with a bias toward the layers most people prefer to abstract away: network stacks, CPU internals, kernel interfaces, and the code paths that turn should into does.

I care about understanding systems, not just operating them. When I built Lodestone, a zero-copy packet analyzer in C, the interesting part wasn’t getting it to run. It was learning why mmap-based capture beats read(), and where the kernel’s ring buffers actually live. When I deployed a honeypot and threat intelligence pipeline, the interesting part wasn’t collecting attacks. It was watching what people actually try, and thinking about what a real detection strategy would look like at scale. When I wrote vm16bit, a virtual machine with its own ISA and assembler, the point was to feel the machine. You can’t reverse engineer or exploit what you don’t understand at the bytecode level.

My background is a general engineering degree with a heavy software and systems track: two years of CPGE (mathematics and computer science) before IMT Atlantique, where I’ve studied collaborative development, DevOps, and now start a year specialized in cybersecurity. My reading tends to run ahead of my coursework. SICP for how to think about programs, Stevens’ TCP/IP Illustrated for how the network actually behaves, Dummit & Foote when I want to sit with harder structure.

I’ve worked in teams: coursework, open source (yt-dlp, a codebase with 100k+ stars and 50k+ lines), and personal projects that outgrew “personal.” I’m comfortable both leading and being led. I write clearly, I argue technical positions without hedging, and I care about being correct more than being right.

Currently working toward my RHCSA. Next year: a security-focused PFE, then a first full-time role in detection engineering, blue team, or security-focused systems work. Reverse engineering and low-level security are where I want to end up over time, and the projects on this site are pointed in that direction.

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