Point Blank Blog

Latest — 05 Jul 2026

Decoding Cryptography: The Fall of Historical ciphers

Previously, on "The Love Letter Problem"… In the last blog, we met Alice and Bob, watched our nosy postman fail to crack their symmetric encryption, and laid down the formal syntax (Gen, Enc, Dec), Kerckhoffs' Principle, attack models, and a question: what does "secure" actually

More issues

Decoding Cryptography: Understanding the Attacker (and the 4 Attack Models)

The Love Letter Problem Remember when you were a kid and wanted to write a love letter to your sweetheart, but a nosy neighbour kept peeking while you were trying to write? This has been a problem faced by people ever since we learnt how to communicate. We can'

Understanding Basic Networking in Cybersecurity

What I learned from a session by my senior Pragati Raj After the cryptography session, Pragati Raj moved on to another core subject: Networking. He said something very simple but important. Networking is how systems communicate with each other. At first, it sounded obvious. But as the session went deeper,

From Confusion to Clarity, My First Deep Dive into Cryptography

What I learned from a session by my senior Pragati Raj It Started With a Simple Question “Do you know how HTTP works? And why HTTPS is secure?” That was the first thing my senior asked when the session began. At that moment, I thought I had a basic idea.

Exploring Git: From Blobs and Trees to Practical Workflows

How does git store files and keep track of everything while being efficient? What's inside the .git folder?? With these interactive questions the session was kick started by Alfiya didi . One of the most interesting questions she asked was: Can Git store or commit an empty folder? We&

Winning Hackathons and Building a Career in Tech

Written by Chirag Anand Inspired by a talk at Point Blank by Naman Parlecha, Mohit Nagaraj, and Vivek Agarwal. A polished LinkedIn profile or a viral tweet doesn’t guarantee your career in tech. However, when paired with real skills and consistent effort, they can open doors which you didn&

The 24 Hour Hackathon might go extinct. I hope it survives.

A couple of weekends ago, Bangalore witnessed two important hackathons. Devfolio's Build India (Anthropic x Replit x LightSpeed) and Google's Gemini 3 Hackathon. Build India had a hacking time of about 7 hours, and Google's hackathon was only a bit longer. But hackathons have

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)

Lately I have been involved in many conversations in my current company regarding Transformers, but what I feel is that people love to understand what Transformers are, but they do not want to understand the tradeoffs. Maybe the problem that we are solving could've been solved by RNNs

The Superteam that won it all - Point Blank's 2025 Wrapped

In 2025, Point Blank won thirty Hackathons, including three podiums at NITK's HackVerse and five winning teams at Smart India Hackathon. Twenty -four people got Internships and Job offers from companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, Visa, NASDAQ, CloudSEK, FinalRoundAI. Twenty -three of the worlds five-hundred Linux Foundation

Ambition is a luxury.

There are days when I feel like life has already ended, even though my body keeps showing up for it every day. I can't point to any exact moment when it all started or happened. There is no singular disaster or cinematic collapse I can point to, but