Uppsala University, Department of Information Technology

The Department of Information Technology has a leading position in research and education. TheDepartment currently has about 280 employees, including 120 teachers and 110 PhD students. More than 4000 students study one or more courses at the department each year. More info: http://www.it.uu.se

Subject area and Duties: The topic for the PhD position is techniques for software security. Central topics are techniques for, detecting and removing bugs security vulnerabilities in software, and techniques for verifying and analyzing software and protocols for security properties. Since bugs and vulnerabilities in software can lead to huge damages when exploited, it is important that software components are bug-free and correctly implement security services.

Techniques that the positions will focus on include testing using fuzzing, taint analysis, model learning, program analysis, formal verification, symbolic execution supported by constraint solving and SMT. Among the goals is to significantly extend the power and scalability of such techniques to real-world code bases; examples of foreseen applications include to analyze the widely-used Contiki OS for IoT, as well as implementations of widely used security protocols, such as TLS and DTLS.

Research environment: The positions are funded by recent five-year grants from SSF (the Foundation for Strategic Research, see https://assist-project.github.io) that bring together several research groups at Uppsala University (Bengt Jonsson, Parosh Abdulla, Mohammed Faouzi Atig, Philipp Ruemmer, Kostis Sagonas, Wang Yi) that are world-renowned in the fields of automated verification, programming language implementation, and testing. Past contributions include the UPPAAL model checker, high-impact techniques and tools for testing and verification of multithreaded software, including Concuerror and Nidhugg, and the native-code compiler and several tools for the Erlang programming language. Members received the CAV (Computer-Aided Verification) Award, the most prestigious academic award in the area, both in 2013 (Wang Yi) and in 2017 (Parosh Abdulla and Bengt Jonsson). The work is performed in collaboration with partners at RISE SICS (Luca Mottola, Thiemo Voigt) that contribute to developing the ContikiOS, and the SICS Security lab (Shahid Raza).

Requirements: The candidate should have a Master of Science in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent, in a field which is relevant for the work. We expect the candidate to be fluent in verbal and written English.

It is helpful to have a good background in some of the fields of testing, security, program analysis, compiler techniques, model checking, formal verification, software engineering, and similar, as well as to be proficient in implementing non-trivial algorithms.

The position is for a maximum of five years and includes departmental duties at a level of at most 20% (typically teaching) as well as taking graduate courses. The candidate will be expected to teach in English or Swedish.

Application: The application should include a statement of purpose, motivating preferred research directions. The application should further include a description of past experience, a CV, copies of exams, degrees and grades, a copy of Master thesis (or a draft thereof), relevant publications, and other relevant documents. The candidates should indicate the earliest feasible starting date of employment and are encouraged to provide letter(s) of recommendation and contact information to reference persons. 

Rules governing Ph.D. candidates are set out in the Higher Education Ordinance Chapter 5, §§ 1-7 and in Uppsala university's rules and guidelines http://regler.uu.se/search/?hits=30&languageId=1&search-language_en=English

Uppsala University strives to be an inclusive workplace that promotes equal opportunities and attracts qualified candidates who can contribute to the University’s excellence and diversity. We welcome applications from all sections of the community and from people of all backgrounds.

Salary: According to local agreement for PhD students.
 
Starting date: As agreed upon.

Type of employment: Temporary position according to the Higher Education Ordinance chapter 5 § 7.

Scope of employment: 100 %

For further information about the position please contact Bengt Jonsson (bengt.jonsson@it.uu.se), Philipp Ruemmer (philipp.ruemmer@it.uu.se), eller Kostis Sagonas (kostis@it.uu.se)

Please submit your application by 25 June 2019, UFV-PA 2019/2124.

Are you considering moving to Sweden to work at Uppsala University? If so, you will find a lot of information about working and living in Sweden at www.uu.se/joinus. You are also welcome to contact International Faculty and Staff Services at ifss@uadm.uu.se.

Type of employment Temporary position
Contract type Full time
First day of employment According to local agreement for PhD students.
Salary Fixed salary
Number of positions 1
Full-time equivalent 100 %
City Uppsala
County Uppsala län
Country Sweden
Reference number UFV-PA 2019/2124
Union representative
  • Seko Universitetsklubben, seko@uadm.uu.se
  • ST/TCO, tco@fackorg.uu.se
  • Saco-rådet, saco@uadm.uu.se
Published 04.Jun.2019
Last application date 25.Jun.2019 11:59 PM CEST

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