PhD candidate (m/f/d) | Software Security

The Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy in Bochum is a research institute of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V. (MPG), which conducts interdisciplinary research into the many aspects of IT security and data protection. The newly formed and expanding institute will eventually include 18 research groups and employ approximately 200 staff and guests. The institute cooperates with the Faculty of Computer Science at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Bochum is one of the world's leading research locations for cybersecurity and home to Europe's largest educational institution in this field as well as a lively start-up scene.

In the Research Group for Software Security, we are now looking for a PhD candidate (m/f/d) to participate in the 5-year project, AT✩SCALE, to develop groundbreaking techniques to analyse and improve the security of software systems at scale.

• The aim of Project AT✩SCALE is to address a fundamental societal challenge of our time: Securing our systems to be robust to hacker attacks.
• Our project will address issues of scale and reliability that have plagued existing techniques by developing new, scale-oblivious empirical techniques for security analysis.
• Enabled by recent technological advances, our in-vivo software analysis will leverage a rich set of observational and experimental methods to establish facts about the system and a potentially causal structure among these facts. For instance, virtualization allows us to copy the entire software system, as it is running, thousands of times per second and conduct rapid experiments on these clones.
• Kernel-tracing allows us to capture the properties of a software system running across large fleets of machines while statistical reasoning allows us to quantify our uncertainty in empirical statements about these properties.

The research group is lead by Marcel Böhme and the project is funded by an European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator grant ("In-vivo Software Security Analysis at Scale").

Requirements

• The PhD applicant should have a BSc or MSc in Computer Science.
• The PhD applicant should demonstrate one of the following:
  • strong background in theory (e.g., statistics, causal inference, learnability theory, model checking).
  • strong background in systems (e.g., fuzzing, hypervisors, eBPF/kernel, CTFs, OSS contributions).

Our offer

• An opportunity to work in an international team.
• Our institute has an open working atmosphere with communication at eye level and flat hierarchies.
• Payment is in accordance with the collective agreement of the public service (TVöD Bund) including corresponding social benefits and a special annual payment.
• We offer 30 days of vacation.
• Regular team events round off our offer.

Application

Then we look forward to receiving your application! Please send an email to marcel.boehme@mpi-sp.org with the subject line containing [PhD candidate in the project at scale] and the email containing:

• CV
• Statement of Purpose
• Contact information for two references

Reviewing of applications will start on December 6th, 2024, and continue until the position is filled.

The Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy stands for a collaborative, diverse and inclusive workplace culture and promotes equal opportunities. We strongly encourage applications from members of any underrepresented group in our research area. In particular, we invite and motivate women and individuals with disabilities to apply.