Queen’s University Belfast

Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT), Queen’s University Belfast, UK

CSIT Doctoral Training Programme – 15 PhD Studentships

The Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT) at Queen’s University Belfast is currently offering a number of fully-funded PhD opportunities – up to 15 scholarships commencing in October 2023- in the following areas: Network & Wireless Security, Trusted Hardware & Applied Cryptography, Autonomous Security & Security of AI, Industrial Control System and Safety-critical System security.

As a PhD student you’ll be part of our CSIT Doctoral Training Program (DTP), an industry-supported dynamic doctoral research environment, aiming to produce a cohort of industry-conscious thinkers and leaders. The DTP will provide you with an opportunity to advance research in these exciting cyber security areas and be part of a vibrant world-class research community, while also having a focus on enterprise and leadership skills. Thus, the DTP will aim to offer collaborative and placement opportunities with CSIT industry partners, such as Thales, Qualcomm, Rolls Royce, and Nvidia, to provide real industry experience.

You will also have the unique opportunity to embark on a comprehensive training program, which will give you access to all modules on our certified MSc in Advanced Cyber Security and MSc AI, dedicated Innovation, Leadership and public engagement training, in addition to Spring Schools with seminars by experts in the field of cybersecurity.

Scholarships are available for local and UK-resident students, with a number of opportunities also open to international applicants. The scholarships provide fully paid PhD fees plus and annual tax-free stipend (~£27500) for an extended 3.5 year duration of the PhD project. This is equivalent to an entry level job in industry of > £32000. In addition, we will provide Travel awards to cover the cost of trips to conferences and summer schools. Finally, DTP PhD students will be given the opportunity to experience teaching demonstration to get a taste of academia (maximum ~£500 extra per month) and can apply for thesis and best paper awards.

Applicants must have at least a 2:1 Honours Degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics or closely related discipline.

Closing Date: 15 March 2023

*Please note that the deadline for applications from international candidates closed on 28 February*

For more information on the CSIT’s PhD Opportunities and how to apply, please visit https://www.qub.ac.uk/ecit/CSIT/Cyber-AIHub/CSIT-DTP/

Projects available:

A Trusted Execution Environment based framework for securing legacy embedded systems

An Investigation of Embedded Machine Learning for Space Applications: Circuit Reliability and Model Security

Attacking is the best defence, also in Machine Learning

Context Awareness Enhancement of Physical layer Security Schemes in Multi-user 6G Wireless Networks

Cyber DALL-E for adversarial dataset generation

Cyber Security for Digital Twins

Cyber-defensive deception against intelligent adversaries in autonomous aerial networks

Deep-learning based Hardware Trojan Detection

DPU-Centric Distributed Network and Datacentre Security

Enabling and Accelerating Privacy-Preserving Data Analysis

Fault tolerant post quantum cryptography systems for satellite communications

Highly distributed learning for privacy preserving analytics

HSM enabled precomputation safe asymmetric PAKE designing

Integrated Quantum-resilient Cryptography

Investigating Security Vulnerabilities in Approximate Computing

Leveraging the programmable network for intrusion protection

Lightweight Post Quantum Cryptography on modern open-source RISC-V processors

Machine Learning for Secure 6G Cell-Free Massive MIMO

Malware detection beyond labelled datasets

Malware Vulnerabilities as a Heuristic for Layering Defence Mechanism in Detection Technology

Mitigating security risks in Unified Traffic Management (UTM) systems

Modelling Technopolitical Factors for Analysing and Attributing Cyber Attacks

Multi-Hardware Security for Supply Chain

Physical-Layer Security for IoT

Privacy-preserving By-Design: Brain-inspired Architectures for Security-sensitive Applications

Quantum Machine Learning for Securing 6G Networks

Quantum-Safe Identity-Based Encryption for lightweight Internet of Things

Reconnaissance-type Threat Detection with Datacentre Networks

Secure multi-tenant and federated satellite system

Secure Record Linkage

Secure Retrodirective Antennas using Post-quantum Cryptography

Securing Programmable Networks

Security of 6G O-RAN

Side-channel analysis and countermeasure on Post Quantum Cryptographic

Side-channel analysis supports in Physical Unclonable Function modelling

Using Reinforcement Learning to Prepare Cyber-Attack Responses for Cyber Physical Systems