Christian David Varela

Cybersecurity · AI Security Research · Founder, Psypher Labs

Remain coherent for the word human to include us all and not exclude anyone

christian-varela.com  ·  github.com/dreamsudo  ·  linkedin.com/in/varela-sf  ·  mailingvarela@proton.me  ·  San Francisco, CA

Projects
Psypher AI Threat Assessor
github.com/dreamsudo/Psypher-AI-Threat-Assessor

Open-source, full-stack AI-security engine that red-teams a deployed model and audits the infrastructure it runs on, then maps every finding across MITRE ATLAS, ATT&CK, and D3FEND into one traceable, grounded report. Python, built on the Anthropic API.

DPC-YOLO26
github.com/dreamsudo/AI-vision-defense-systems-DPC

Diffusion-Prior Consistency: essentially, AI protecting AI vision models. A from-scratch defense that keeps object-detection systems from being fooled by adversarial patches. My cybersecurity capstone, with a full research paper.

Skills
AI & ML security

LLM red-teaming: jailbreaks, direct and indirect prompt injection, system-prompt extraction, training-data and system-prompt leakage, refusal-robustness evaluation. Adversarial machine learning (adversarial-patch attacks and defenses), model evaluation and safety testing, knowledge-graph grounding and anti-hallucination.

Machine learning

PyTorch, diffusion models, object detection, NLP. Empirical evaluation and experiment management: deterministic seeding, ablations, bootstrap CIs, reproducible pipelines.

Offensive security

Penetration testing of infrastructure, web applications, and AI/ML systems, vulnerability research, version-aware CVE analysis, privilege-escalation enumeration, kill-chain construction, and digital forensics. Kali, Metasploit, Burp Suite, Wireshark, Nikto, nmap.

Defensive security

Threat modeling and threat mapping, D3FEND countermeasure design, detection and incident response, network security, firewalls and intrusion detection, access control, operating-system and enterprise hardening (Linux, kernel, containers), risk assessment, and tamper-evident evidence logging.

Frameworks & standards

MITRE ATLAS, MITRE ATT&CK, MITRE D3FEND, NIST CSF, CWE, CVE, CISA KEV, NVD.

Cryptography

Applied cryptography, symmetric and asymmetric encryption, hashing and digital signatures, key exchange, PKI and TLS, post-quantum cryptography (lattice-based schemes and the NIST PQC standards), and hash-chained integrity.

Programming & systems

Python (fluent), Bash, Java. Linux, Docker, systemd, networking, SQLite. Automated testing and CI, Git. Secure coding and software/application security.

Focus
  • AI red-teaming & model evaluation
  • Adversarial ML attacks & defenses
  • Offensive security & vuln research
  • Threat mapping ATLAS → D3FEND
Work eligibility
U.S. citizen
Authorized to work in the US, no visa sponsorship required.
Lab
Founder — Psypher Labs
An independent, open-source AI-security research lab and think tank.
Education
B.S. Cybersecurity
California State University San Marcos, 2026. Dean's List.
National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense (CAE-CD)
Designated by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and DHS
Foundations
Data structures & algorithms, computer architecture, linear algebra, statistics, discrete mathematics.
Languages
English & Spanish (native). Italian & French (professional).