Call for Master's Students 2020/21
Who I am: A Brief Presentation for Candidate Master's Students at IST
Hi! My name is Nuno Santos. I'm a faculty at IST / Universidade de Lisboa and a senior researcher in the Distributed Systems Group at INESC-ID, a leading research institute in Portugal.
Over the past few years, I've been building up a team of students -- the Systems Security Team (or SysSec for short) -- united by a common goal: to make impactful contributions in the area of computer security and software systems. The profile of our work is highly research-oriented and applied to the real world. In particular, our mission is to identify important real-world problems in systems security, problems that affect everyday's people's lives, and develop innovative technical solutions to those problems.
In this context, I'm looking forward to growing our team, and I'd like to invite passionate, team-working, and hard-working master's students who'd like to face some good challenges, and want to do top-notch research with my team. With this in mind, I'll give you an overview of the research we're doing at SysSec, and then tell you about the master's thesis topics we will propose for 2020/21.
BTW, if you are tired of writing disposable code for coursework projects and want to try the real thing, you can have a taste of what's like to do research with us by applying for an internship, where you'll have the chance to cooperate with me and my students in some exciting ongoing projects for a couple of months. If you are interested, scroll down, and you will find more information about internship opportunities at SysSec.
We Do Research in Four Core Areas
Let me give you an overview of the four main areas that we're actively engaged into. This will help you see the big picture of what we do at SysSec, and understand where your work will be fitting in. Each thesis will be performed in the context of one of these areas:
- TRUSTED EXECUTION ENVIRONMENTS (TE)
- ONLINE CENSORSHIP AND ANONYMITY (CA)
- DATA SECURITY AND PRIVACY (DS)
- WEB SECURITY (WS)
Master's Thesis Topics
This is the list of topics we're currently preparing. For 2020/21, the main areas where we will need more help are CA and WS. This list is likely going to be updated within the next weeks. Stay tuned!
- [CA.1] Routing Infrastructure for Censorship-Resistant Overlay Networks
- [CA.2] Security and Trust Management for Censorship-Resistant Overlay Networks
- [CA.3] Traceless Execution Support for Censorship-Resistant Tools (already reserved for a student)
- [CA.4] Privacy-preserving Deanonymization of Hidden Service Traffic in the Dark Web with Encrypted Deep Learning
- [WS.1] Robust Symbolic Execution for WebAssembly
- [WS.2] Exploit Generation for WebAssembly with SE-based Taint Tracking
- [WS.3] Symbolic Runtime Modeling for Automatic Exploit Generation
Internship Opportunities
If you have some free time and would like to apply for a short-term internship at SysSec, don't hesitate and get in touch with me. We are accepting applications the whole year. The internship itself will consist of a short term project defined between me and the applicant. For each project, we will specify a workplan: goals, expected deliverables, and timeline. Each intern will work closely with a PhD and / or master's student in one of their projects. The level of difficulty will be adjusted to the skillset of the applicant. There's enough room for you to work with us even if you're a first-year student at LEIC. If you are interested in any of the areas above, all you need to do is to send me an email with a brief statement of interest (i.e., describing your motivation) and your CV (i.e., describing courses completed and grades, other interests).