About

Ahmed Taha Bouallegui

M.Eng. student in Internet of Things & Cybersecurity at Polytech Lille, and the author of this site, written from a corner of a home lab that's slowly winning the war against clutter.

Portrait of Ahmed Bouallegui against a white background

Ahmed Taha Bouallegui

M.Eng. student, IoT & Cybersecurity · Polytech Lille

I'm training as an engineer at the seam where systems and security meet, an M.Eng in Internet of Things & Cybersecurity at Polytech Lille, but most of what I know I learned outside the classroom: on a self-hosted server, in a home lab, and inside a NixOS config that now builds every machine I run from the same tree.

I started as the person everyone asked to fix the network, which quietly turned into the person everyone asks why the network was broken in the first place. That path took me from automating quality control on a Valeo production line, to running the school's FabLab, to a research internship with the 2XS team at CRIStAL, where I took the subprocess calls out of a Linux tool that detects IoT devices from their 802.11 traffic.

I'm most useful when I can look at a system no one else fully understands, find the part that only works by accident, and make it work on purpose, then write it down, so the lesson doesn't cost you a day the way it cost me an hour.

What I work on

Linux & Declarative Infrastructure

NixOS, Debian, Docker, systemd, self-hosted services with configs that rebuild themselves identically anywhere.

Networking & Isolation

Tailnet-only exposure, strict per-user isolation, and hardening the boring parts first.

Embedded & Wireless Security

IoT detection via nl80211, AVR/ARM assembly, and embedded software built for small footprints and fewer surprises.

CTF & Reverse Engineering

Binary RE, web vulnerabilities, and memory corruption. Jeanne d'Hack and whatever the next challenge is.

Learning in public

This blog. If a lesson cost me an hour of debugging, it shouldn't cost you a day.

Where I've been

  1. Research internship, 2XS team, CRIStAL

    IRCICA • Université de Lille · Jun to Jul 2026

    Replaced every fork and exec of iw and ip in the wifi module of a device-detection probe with direct nl80211 and rtnetlink calls, and added automatic wireless interface discovery; contributed to embedded software work on memory footprint, energy efficiency, and security.

  2. Declarative everything, with Nix

    Since Feb 2026

    One flake-parts tree builds a laptop, a retired laptop kept for conservation, and a headless server. Shared feature modules, per-machine hardware, encrypted secrets.

  3. Self-hosted server infrastructure

    Since Jan 2026

    A headless server running Immich, Jellyfin, Grocy, SearXNG and Samba, with strict per-user isolation. It started on Debian in January 2026 and was rebuilt on NixOS in February. Nothing is exposed to the public internet: every service is reachable through a VPS only.

  4. Fabmanager at the Fabricarium FabLab

    Polytech Lille · Apr 2025 to Present

    Running the school's maker space: 3D printers, laser cutters, CNC, and the electronics zone shared with the Robotech club.

  5. Automation internship at Valeo

    Tunis, Tunisia · Jul to Aug 2023

    Automated a sound-recognition quality check on a steering-wheel production line with Python and Librosa.