S3 Lab is currently seeking two qualified Ph.D. students for projects in the following research topics:

• Security of Autonomous & Robotic Vehicles – AutoInsight, RetroV
• Trusted Embedded and IoT Devices – Trusted Things
• Peripheral Device Security – PeriShield
• Confidential AI Computing in Cloud & Edge Platforms – AI Vault
• Operating System Security – CLUE, Shear

The following technical skills are required for our research:

• High Fluency in C/C++ and Python Code
• Strong Familiarity with Linux Command Line Environment
• Excellent Technical Writing Skills in English

Prior experience in any of the following optional techniques will be a plus:

• Robotics & Control Systems: ROS, Autonomous Driving Systems (Autoware, Baidu Apollo), Drone Control Systems (ArduPilot, PX4), PID Controller
• Program Analysis & Software Testing: Rust, LLVM, GCC, QEMU, Pin, Valgrind, Fuzzing (AFL, LibFuzzer), Symbolic Execution (KLEE, S2E)
• Hacking & Reverse Engineering: CTF, IDA, Ghidra, Detours, DynamoRIO, Dyninst
• Embedded Systems & Hardware Security: Verilog, FPGA, Device IO (MMIO, DMA, GPIO), Memory Protection (MMU, MPU, Intel MPX), Trusted Execution Environments (Intel SGX, AMD SEV, ARM TrustZone), Execution Tracing and Debugging (Intel PT, ARM ETM, JTAG)

Our group publishes research papers at top security conferences (e.g., USENIX Security, CCS and NDSS). All projects will be open source.

Qualified students will be funded for their tuition and competitive salaries, sufficient for living in the area without external support.

If you have expertise in the skills and techniques, and are willing to commit to a research and development project in our group, please fill out this application form.

S3 Lab is part of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas). The department has around 53 strong research faculty engaged in cutting-edge research. In the past ten years, UT Dallas CS has achieved top-notch research contributions in multiple areas (#33 in Security by CSRankings.org in 2021). S3 Lab is also part of the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute with 15 core faculty working in various areas of cyber security research.

UT Dallas is one of the fastest-growing public universities in the United States, located in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metropolitan area. The university has an outstanding research environment and it is at a convenient location for students for a living:

• #1 best value public university in Texas and #2 fastest growing public doctoral university in the US.
• Most Ph.D. students are fully funded through TA/RA-ships including tuition, stipend, and travel support.
• The Dallas area has diverse communities from many different countries (e.g., Koreatown) and a large international airport (DFW Airport) with direct flights to most major cities in the world.

UT Dallas CS Admissions:: https://cs.utdallas.edu/admissions