Robin Reel

Security-minded systems and infrastructure generalist.

About

I am an IT specialist at a healthcare provider in Springfield, Missouri, where I look after the network, the servers, the endpoints and the security of both. I am finishing a BS in Information Technology on the IT Infrastructure track at Missouri State University in May 2027.

I’m most passionate about working with things that people actually depend on. I operate a public NTP server and my own mail server. I’ve also found multiple security vulnerabilities in deployed software, including one that was a risk to patient safety.

Experience

IT Specialist, – present ✦ IT Intern,

Health Hub Clinic & Health Guardian Imaging

IT for a clinic and an affiliated imaging practice, in an environment subject to HIPAA.

Infrastructure

  • Replaced end-of-support Windows Server 2016 file server and Active Directory domain controllers with Samba on Debian Linux, avoiding at least $3,000 in licensing and upgrade costs.
  • Migrated an aging PACS gateway to a virtualized environment after its hardware began to fail, ending recurring downtime for imaging.
  • Replaced a double-NATing consumer wireless router with managed access points, and migrated an end-of-support SonicWall TZ600 firewall to a TZ670.
  • Moved an off-site VPN-connected NAS onto the on-site LAN and reintegrated it with the firewall, the Windows clients and the imaging system clients.
  • Restored server access within two hours of storm damage to a jumpbox by tracing the fault to electrical pitting on a RAID controller pin and shimming the connection.
  • Produced the first documentation of the network, which had none, using Nmap, firewall configuration review and physical cable tracing.

Security

  • I discovered an unauthenticated endpoint allowing attackers to HTTP PATCH patient charts, including medications and allergies. I also found a PHI-exposing authentication bypass vulnerability in the in-house EMR, and found three other vulnerabilities in other in-house software: stored XSS via poorly sanitized UGC, and two instances of broken access control exposing private messages. I fixed two and escalated three to developers. I then verified the findings were completely remediated.
  • Deployed Wazuh SIEM with agents on the office servers, roughly twenty workstations and the PACS gateway.
  • Configured Microsoft Intune compliance baselines and Entra ID Conditional Access policies supporting HIPAA compliance for Windows, Office and Teams.
  • Discovered long-standing unenforced DMARC and broken SPF on one domain, demoed spoofing of sender addresses, then brought company domains to an enforced DMARC policy and corrected SPF records.
  • Ran an authorized phishing simulation end to end, including the pretext and landing page, and briefed leadership on the results.
  • Discovered and remediated other security issues: SMB signing was disabled, EoS software was running on multiple endpoints, and unencrypted DICOM was traveling on the general office LAN.

Independent security research

Manifold Markets — double-spend in dependent multiple-choice markets

Discovered and responsibly disclosed. Bug bounty awarded.

Manifold’s dependent multiple-choice markets are ones where exactly one option is expected to resolve YES and the rest NO, so the automated market maker continuously rebalances the options to sum to 100%. Because the AMM could be made to fill several of a user’s resting limit orders in a single rebalance, all of them executed, even when the account held only enough balance to cover one. For example, on a three-way market sitting at 33/33/33, a YES purchase on the first option drives the AMM to push the other two down together, which could fill two orders waiting there and spend the same money twice.

OpenEMR — integrity issue

Independently discovered and reported. Credited as Finder on the GitHub Security Advisory. Public disclosure and CVE assignment pending.

Infrastructure I run

Public NTP and NTS server

A stratum 2 time server in pool.ntp.org, serving plain NTP on UDP/123 and NTS on TCP/4460, running chrony on Debian. It currently holds the maximum pool monitoring score of 20.

  • Simple stats at the service status page, detailed stats at ntpstats.txt
  • Around 109 million unique client IP addresses seen, or about one in every 33 routable IPv4 addresses.
  • Abusive clients shed with an nftables rate limiter.

Other services on dreamstation.systems

  • A personal mail server with SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS and TLS-RPT configured correctly, which moved its SpamAssassin score from 4.9 to 0.6.
  • A DMZ bridged to a VPS over WireGuard, allowing me to run public-facing servers on a home network physically behind NAT.
  • An obfs4 Tor bridge carrying roughly 500 GB of traffic a month.
  • Gopher, Gemini, Spartan, finger and several other small protocols.
  • A service status page.

Segmented home network

  • VLAN segmentation with a Wazuh SIEM instance collecting logs and flagging anomalous traffic.
  • Log collection for legacy machines too old to run the Wazuh agent, which Windows gives no native syslog path off of. I wrote the shipper and the parser myself in Perl, with local Qwen models summarizing the results.

Software

OpenGET

A market analysis tool and price tracker for the Old School RuneScape in-game economy. Go backend, SQLite storage.

  • Ingests the OSRS Wiki real-time prices API into a tiered archive with a five-year backfill: dual-pool WAL SQLite with nightly rollup, prune and compaction.
  • Accountless, cookie-based identity: 128-bit tokens encoded in Crockford Base32, with only SHA-256 hashes of the tokens stored server-side.
  • One shared document model; make a change in one place and render every page to HTML, gemtext, Gopher maps and plaintext.
  • Conforms to WCAG 2.2 Level AA.

!~ATH

A concurrent esoteric programming language in which all control flow is predicated on waiting for something to die, after the fictional ~ATH language from Homestuck. Loops wait on the death of an entity and run their body in the death callback.

  • Self-hosting: the transpiler is written in !~ATH and emits C89 through a continuation-passing style transform. Around 19,000 lines of !~ATH and 497 test cases.
  • Entities include timers, processes, connections, file watchers and raw IPv4 sockets. The language supports networking, I/O and a C FFI. Targets Linux, Windows and WebAssembly.
  • Ships a browser playground for version 1.3.
  • !^CAKE, a companion schema definition language about baking, fills a hole in !~ATH’s FFI, which could marshal scalars and pointers but not aggregates. A recipe describes a C-compatible byte layout, recipes compose through merge and tagged-union operators, and every recipe reduces deterministically to an eight-character code that two peers can compare over a wire before exchanging any payload.

xcaca

An X11 server that renders its framebuffer as ASCII art in a terminal, so ordinary X clients can run over SSH or in headless environments.

  • Built on the Kdrive backend, and using libcaca for rendering.
  • Synthesizes evdev scancodes from libcaca character events to give X clients keyboard and mouse input, both over SSH or locally.
  • Selectable dithering algorithms and character sets, with brightness, gamma and contrast controls, and terminal cell aspect ratio detected at startup through TIOCGWINSZ.

Hypnospace Outlaw page converter

In progress. Converts pages from the game Hypnospace Outlaw into real web pages, which meant reverse engineering the game’s undocumented page format first.

  • Documented the .hsp format completely: a Construct 2 array export whose three axes carry elements, states and properties, including the conditional state resolution the game uses to swap page content on story flags, and the coordinate and layout rules across all 1,292 shipped pages.
  • Reimplemented the game’s tracker music playback well enough to convert each .hsm module down to an audio file: pattern sequencing, per-pattern BPM, the instrument table, note pitch, per-step volume, pan and note gating.
  • Currently rewriting the rendering logic so accessibility features work properly, rather than mimicking the game’s behavior as the first pass does.

viewpoint

In progress. A terminal multiplexer built around a desktop window manager metaphor: floating windows with title bars, draggable borders, minimize and maximize buttons, edge snapping and a taskbar, each running its own program in a dedicated PTY. Roughly 11,000 lines of C. Built on notcurses, libvterm, libsixel and GPM.

  • Fully rebindable keymap with an in-application settings panel covering keybindings, theming, scrollback and user-defined desktop icons, backed by an XDG-style config file.

ilo toki nasa

An 11M-parameter smolGPT-style decoder trained from scratch on Toki Pona. I built the corpus from the kulupu lapo poki corpus, stripping metadata and using programmatic grammar analyzers to remove text that was not actually Toki Pona. Output is approaching coherence.

Oboe

A general-purpose programming language I am co-creating with Jade K..

  • Self-hosting compiler: the lexer, parser, code generator and diagnostics are written in Oboe and transpile to C.
  • Toolchain and package manager with a lockfile, plus reedbed, the package registry servers.

Open source

Upstream contributions

Pull requests merged into other people’s projects include:

  • dinky, a terminal text editor: added GPM mouse support, tty appearance improvements, a horizontal scrollbar with autohide and mouse capture, and mouse tab reordering with reflow animations.
  • warpinator-windows: removed a spurious GPL acceptance prompt.
  • plasma-claude-usage: removed false precision from displayed figures.
  • AC-Letter-Scorer: corrected character selection to skip leading whitespace.

Open, awaiting review:

  • KDE Konsole: Adds support for passing horizontal scrolling into the inner application. Konsole previously discarded horizontal wheel events.
  • KDE Eloquens: Replaces logic depending on a dead API with a local version.

Also a contributor to the Toki Pona localization of Firefox.

Arch User Repository

Maintainer of seven packages, writing build scripts with upstream signature verification.

Skills

Skills by category and proficiency
Category Proficient Familiar
Operating systems Linux, server and desktop; Windows desktop Windows Server
Infrastructure SonicWall, DNS, email hosting and authentication, Wazuh VMware ESXi, Samba, Nmap, Wireshark, Git, systemd
Endpoint management Microsoft Intune, Entra ID
Programming C, Bash Perl, SQL, Python, JavaScript and TypeScript, Go

Education and certifications

Missouri State University

BS, Information Technology, IT Infrastructure track. Springfield, Missouri. Expected .

Certifications

  • CompTIA Security+ (2026)
  • CompTIA Network+ (2026)
  • CompTIA A+ (2026)