Enhancing the Security of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs)

Royal Holloway, University of London is delighted to announce a call for applicants for a fully funded Industrial Cooperative Awards in Science & Technology (iCase) doctoral studentship, from October 2024. The doctoral studentship is provided by EPSRC and the industrial partner ARM.

The studentship will focus on the forefronts of cybersecurity research in cyber security aiming to address the increasingly sophisticated microarchitectural covert and side channel attacks, for processors and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). With the rise of these complex vulnerabilities, there is a critical need for automatic detection and innovative mitigation strategies.

The project will be supervised by Prof Konstantinos Markantonakis, director of the Smart Card IoT Security Centre (SCC) of the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University of London.

The student will be expected to spend full time at Royal Holloway and a period of at least 3 months with the industrial sponsor (ARM).

We encourage the widest range of potential students to study for this studentship and are committed to welcoming students from different backgrounds and non-standard pathways.

Project Summary

The successful candidate will embark on a groundbreaking research journey to develop advanced AI methodologies capable of automatically discovering potential covert channels and speculative execution vulnerabilities. By leveraging artificial intelligence, the project seeks to analyse system logs and metrics in-depth, identifying microarchitectural behaviours indicative of such attacks. The analysis will explore post-incident analysis and it will also consider performance and security considerations for real-time execution analysis. The ultimate goal will be to provide implemented countermeasures against the identified vulnerabilities.

Furthermore, at the boundaries of the proposed research effort it is expected to explore the use of compiler plugins as a novel approach to identifying and patching these vulnerabilities, offering a more secure computing environment against these pervasive threats. This PhD project, situated at the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and software engineering, offers an excellent opportunity for a candidate passionate about making impactful advancements in securing computing infrastructures against next-generation cyber threats.

Further details can be found on the iCase doctoral studentship website, here.

All interested candidates are required to apply formally through the Royal Holloway Applicant Portal. On the portal please note:

·        In the Research Proposal document section of the application, please include “RHUL ARM studentship competition” as the name of the studentship.

·        “Prof Konstantinos Markantonakis,” is stated as the academic contact/supervisor for the studentship.

Please note that appointment of the PhD student is subject to availability or clearance of funding from the relevant funders.