We have one open position to work for 4-6 months as an intern on uncovering backdoors in real-world software.
TITLE - Assessing Backdoor Detection Tools in Real-World Scenarios.
TOPIC - Backdoors in software are stealthy, malicious functionalities that can grant unauthorized access or escalate privileges—often triggered by obscure, secret inputs. Imagine hard-coded credentials silently embedded in a file server’s codebase, giving attackers global access with a single exploit.
At the forefront of cybersecurity research, our team is developing cutting-edge tools to automatically detect such threats in source or binary code (see Kokkonis et al.). As an intern, you’ll play a key role in evaluating these tools against real-world software, helping us understand their strengths, limitations, and potential for deployment in critical systems.
💡 What You’ll Do
- Work hands-on with advanced code analysis tools.
- Test and validate detection capabilities on real software projects.
- Collaborate with researchers to refine methodologies.
- Contribute to the future of secure software development.
🎯 Who We’re Looking For
- Passionate about cybersecurity, software engineering, or code analysis.
- Familiar with code reverse engineering, vulnerability detection, or fuzzing.
- Curious, analytical, and eager to make an impact.
🌱 What You’ll Gain
- Experience in a high-impact research environment.
- Mentorship from experts in software security.
- A chance to contribute to published research and real-world tools.
KEYWORDS - software security, reverse engineering, backdoors, fuzzing
LANGUAGES - x86/ARM assembly, C/C++, Linux scripting
SUPERVISION - Supervision will be provided by Michaël Marcozzi, with some help from Dimitri Kokkonis.
HOSTING - You will be hosted at the CEA offices, part of the Paris-Saclay research cluster.
To apply, please check out the detailed application procedure and job info.
When to apply - As soon as possible, directly by email to Michaël Marcozzi! We process applications as soon as they arrive (depending on our own availability ^^), so don’t be too late.