The Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt (CASED) at the Technische Universität Darmstadt has openings for its PhD scholarship program in the areas of IT Security starting immediately.
CASED is an IT Security research center at Technische Universität Darmstadt in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT) and the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt (h_da). CASED constitutes a research infrastructure for forefront IT Security research.

The offered PhD scholarships belong to one of the following seven key research areas.

• Cryptography
• Privacy and trust
• Security for Cyberphysical Systems and networks
• Security of critical infrastructures
• Usability and security
• Security and Privacy by Design
• Economic and legal aspects of IT-security

Within each research area a number of research topics are offered by the "Primary Investigators" (PI) of CASED including like, e.g.

      ***  Distributed Embedded System Security Monitoring   ***
      ***  Model-Based Security Testing of Embedded Systems  ***

The research topics listed above are both related to the key research areas "Cyberphysical Systems" and "Security by Design". They have a special focus on the integration of systematic testing and runtime monitoring concepts based on

• (Life) Sequence Charts and Petri Nets for communication protocol modelling purposes
• Complex event processing concepts for the specification of "high level" events
• Incremental pattern matching techniques for monitoring self-adaptive communication system structures
• Model-Driven Derivation of (Java/C) software and (FPGA-based) hardware monitors

Studied application domains include "automotive software", "smart grids", and "automation software".

The two research topics require a background in security engineering, software modeling languages, or model transformation approaches as well as a Master degree in Computer Science or a closely related field of study (like Information System Technology or Computer Engineering).

For further information concerning CASED and CASED Ph.D. scholarships in general please visit

  https://scholarship.cased.de/

If you are specifically interested in the two Ph.D. topics listed above you may also contact the responsible PI Prof. Dr. Andy Schürr directly

  http://www.es.tu-darmstadt.de/english/staff/andy-schuerr/

and you should mention your specific interests as well as the responsible PI in your application.

The application deadline for the first round of scholarships is

                           *** 15-Aug-2011 ***