Research

Vasile Ovidiu Ichim

Personal work on OS internals and low-level systems — the other side of how I think about reliability.

Outside product work I spend time on Windows kernel and user-mode internals: drivers, memory access, and how privileged code talks to the rest of the system. That curiosity feeds how I reason about boundaries, failure modes, and performance in production platforms.

Windows Kernel Drivers

Kernel-mode driver experiments in C++ exploring user/kernel communication and IOCTL paths.

// illustrative — user ↔ kernel boundary
NTSTATUS DeviceControl(
  PDEVICE_OBJECT DeviceObject,
  PIRP Irp
) {
  /* validate buffer, dispatch IOCTL */
  return STATUS_SUCCESS;
}

Overlay cheat base — kernel + user-mode

An end-to-end game overlay cheat base: a kernel driver paired with a user-mode client for memory access, DLL loading, and real-time DX11 overlay rendering — mapping process space and drawing without owning the host UI.

How the overlay base works

Privileged reads from the kernel, drawing from user-mode

Select a stage to follow the read-and-draw loop.

End-to-end game cheat (archived)

A separate, full end-to-end cheat for a live game client: process attachment, DLL injection, memory layout, and overlay rendering — the same surfaces anti-cheat systems watch. Built as a Python tool with a custom loader; archived since 2023. Useful for understanding how untrusted code reaches another process’s address space.

Side projects (for fun)

A few open-source things I’ve built outside work — tools, frameworks, and hardware:

  • PyPulse — open-source framework for building Chromium-based desktop apps with a Python backend (on PyPI).
  • cefpythonX — modern fork of cefpython: Python bindings for the Chromium Embedded Framework, extended to run on Python 3.10–3.13.
  • real-tars — a real-life TARS robot (Interstellar): embedded agent on ESP32-S3 + Radxa, streaming voice/vision LLM, sensors, and a walking gait.
  • DiscordEasyCloner — desktop app to duplicate Discord servers, built on PyPulse.
  • Talk with Cletus Spuckler — a small GPT desktop app built to exercise PyPulse.
  • …and many more on GitHub.