PhD Candidates in Computer Security

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label Burse autorenew 2025-09-29, 17:00 history_edu Maria Dumitru
The University of Luxembourg seeks to hire outstanding researchers at its Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT). SnT is a recently formed centre carrying out interdisciplinary research in secure, reliable and trustworthy ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) systems and services, often in collaboration with industrial, governmental or international partners. SnT is active in several international research projects funded by the EU 7th framework programme and the European Space Agency.

Research topic:
One of the greatest challenges facing computer security today is to understand and thus prevent attacks that exploit not only the technical weaknesses of a system but also rely on human, social and physical aspects. Unpredictable behavior of humans, as well as out-of-bound interactions which are usually disregarded in a traditional model of communications, make the problem of modeling and analysis of socio-technical attacks a non-trivial task.



The main objective of the Ph.D. project is to develop a formal framework supporting modeling and analysis of socio-technical components of information systems. We aim to develop strategies and tools to detect and prevent attacks involving human, physical and digital elements. One of the goals is to extend current methodology for security protocol analysis, by taking human behavior and properties of physical objects into account. This goal includes a necessity of defining appropriate adversary models and identifying the security properties relevant in a socio-technical context.

Research Environment:
Both students will collaborate with the research groups SaToSS (Security and Trust of Software Systems) led by Prof. Dr. S. Mauw and APSIA (Applied Security and Information Assurance) led by Prof. Dr. P. Y. A. Ryan. These positions are part of a national research project "Socio-Technical Analysis of Security and Trust" funded by the National Research Fund in Luxembourg.