Recruitment

RESEARCH ASSISTANTS IN TSUNAMi center on SOFTWARE AND SYSTEM SECURITY

DESCRIPTION

The Computer Science Department at the National University of Singapore (NUS) seek 6 research assistants with differing expertise for a project in software and system security, funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF), starting January 2015. These research assistants will be part of a new center on software security - TSUNAMi see http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~tsunami

Several global research labs (NEC), commercial firms (Symantec, ST) and SIngapore-based government agencies (DSTA) have pledged support for translating research outcomes from the newly formed centrer to practice. The investigator team consists of Abhik Roychoudhury (Lead PI), Zhenkai Liang, Jin Song Dong, Prateek Saxena, Roland Yap and Ee-chien Chang.

This 5 year multi-investigator research center aims to develop new mechanisms to detect, withstand and offer strong data protection against attacks on commodity systems composed from COTS components with rich interfaces to the cloud. Our goal is to take a multi-pronged approach to detecting and defeating attacks on the commodity COTS systems. The specific positions will cover the following topics and their intersection.

- Binary analysis: to investigate new techniques for binary analysis for scalable vulnerability detection and auto-patching software. This will involve analysis of program binaries.
- Binary hardening: Hardening existing COTS components to reduce unnecessary functionality through automatic transformations is an important goal of our center.
- Formal verification: Verification of component composition and protocols for communicating across components, is a focus of the center.
- Data protection: The centre also aims to protect data outsourced to external cloud services against data theft, by developing new cryptographic techniques and trusting computing support in hardware.

ABOUT NUS and the CENTER

NUS is a reputed world-class university that provides an outstanding, supportive research environment. Its School of Computing was recently ranked by QS as #1 in Asia and #9 in the world. For more details about the research center, please see http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~tsunami

DOCUMENTS NEEDED FOR APPLICATION

If interested, please send your application including a cover letter, CV and a brief statement of research, specifically any interesting projects you may have done in the area. The initial term of appointment will be 1-2 years extensible to 5 years, upon review of satisfactory performance. The selected candidates will be offered strongly competitive salaries and benefits, ample support to travel for dissemination of research results, and substantial freedom to build up a strong research profile of their own. Starting salary for fresh graduates is $3400 per month. Candidates with more experience can be offered higher salaries.

TO APPLY:

Please e-mail your materials to Ms Jesslyn Lim (jesslyn@nus.edu.sg) with CC to Prof. Abhik Roychoudhury, Lead PI (abhik@comp.nus.edu.sg)