About Me

I am a cybersecurity researcher currently affiliated with the Applied Cybersecurity Lab (ACL) at LSU, and my main areas of research focus are memory forensics and malware analysis. I earned my Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in computer science from Louisiana State University, and I have worked as both a cybersecurity analyst in threat intelligence and as a product security engineer throughout my degree.

I am also a lifelong musician. In my free time, I love going to concerts, playing guitar, and reading.

Research

I currently work with Dr. Golden G. Richard III at ACL, where currently a lot of the research is focused on memory forensics.

My research interests lie in reverse engineering and binary analysis. Thus far, most of it has focused on malware analysis and on doing memory forensics with the Volatility Framework.

For my master’s thesis, I explored new forensic artifacts that are exclusive to Apple’s M1 processors, some of which can only be recovered through memory analysis.

During my undergraduate degree, I managed a repository of over 30 million malware samples and built automation mechanisms to help process them into a database that could later be used for research.

Publications

Papers

• R Mettig, C Glass, A Case, GG Richard III. “Assessing the threat of Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon devices.” Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation, 2023.

Masters Thesis

• Santos Mettig Rocha, Raphaela. “Improving Memory Forensics Capabilities on Apple M1 Computers.” (2022).

Presentations and Talks

Conference:

• BSidesDFW - Rosetta 2: Keeping Mac Malware Alive for Years to Come

Academic:

• LSU Discover Day 2020 - Malware DB: Pre-processing Malicious Samples for Preliminary Analysis (Slides)
• LSU Discover Day 2019 - Automated Unpacking of Malware with Memory Forensics (Slides)

Workshops

• Intro to Git @ LSU Women in Computer Science (WICS)
• Intro to CLI @ LSU Women in Computer Science (WICS)

Blog

TBA

Contact

• ✉️ Email: rsanto2 [at] lsu [dot] edu
• 💼 LinkedIn
• 🐦 Twitter/X
• 💻 Google Scholar
• 🔍 ORCID
• 🐘 Mastodon (Inactive, but this is me!)

Resume / CV is available via request.