PhD Position: Hardware Security of Symmetric-Key Ciphers

1. Introduction

Are you passionate about security and cryptography? Curious about implementation attacks and hardware? Join the Digital Security group (DiS) as a PhD Candidate!

2. Job description

Symmetric-key algorithms play a fundamental role in modern cryptography, offering tools for data encryption and authentication. These algorithms are often implemented in hardware to meet performance and efficiency requirements, but their deployment can expose them to attacks such as side-channel analysis and fault injection. Countermeasures against these attacks typically come at a cost, such as increased chip area or execution time. Therefore, ensuring resistance against physical attacks while maintaining efficiency is a challenge, especially in resource-constrained devices.

Among symmetric-key algorithms, low-latency ciphers are specifically designed to minimise the delay in processing data, making them particularly suitable for applications like memory encryption or pointer authentication. For such ciphers it is essential to design countermeasures that introduce minimal time overhead.

The goal of this project is to investigate countermeasures for symmetric-key ciphers with limited impact on performance. This includes investigating the physical security of their hardware implementations by analysing their susceptibility to side-channel attacks and/or fault injection attacks. The challenge lies in finding a trade-off between security and performance, ensuring that the proposed countermeasures have minimal impact on the overall efficiency of the hardware.

As part of this project, you can work on different tasks, including developing and testing hardware implementations of symmetric-key algorithms, both with and without countermeasures. You will perform side-channel analysis and/or fault injection experiments on these implementations and contribute to designing novel, low-overhead countermeasures. Special attention will be given to low-latency ciphers, in which efficiency is particularly critical. Additionally, you will evaluate the trade-offs between security, performance, and resource usage, providing insights into how these ciphers can be securely deployed in practical settings.

You will be supervised by Dr Silvia Mella and Prof. Lejla Batina to conduct research and publish the results at top-ranked international academic conferences and journals. You will be expected to collaborate with fellow PhD candidates and researchers from Radboud University and from other institutions involved in the project. You will spend about 10% of your time (0.1 FTE) assisting with teaching at our department. This will typically include tutoring practical assignments, grading coursework, and supervising student projects.

Would you like to learn more about what it’s like to pursue a PhD at Radboud University? Visit the page about working as a PhD candidate.

3. Profile

• You should hold a Master’s degree in mathematics, computer science, engineering, or a related field or expect to obtain such a degree soon.
• You have good programming skills and some experience with cryptography, side-channel attacks or hardware description languages.
• You have a strong interest in cryptography and embedded systems security and especially their real-world deployment. 
• You are proficient in English and have good communication, presentation and writing skills.

4. We are

You will join the Digital Security (DiS) group at the Institute for Computing and Information Sciences (iCIS) at Radboud University’s Faculty of Science. The Digital Security group is one of the leading groups in computer security and privacy in the Netherlands and Europe.

Radboud University is located in Nijmegen, a vibrant university city in the east of the Netherlands. The city was granted the 2018 European Green Capital Award. The Netherlands are among the highest ranked countries in the world for quality of life.

5. We offer

• We will give you a temporary employment contract (1.0 FTE) of 1.5 years, after which your performance will be evaluated. If the evaluation is positive, your contract will be extended by 2.5 years (4-year contract).
• You will receive a starting salary of €2,901 gross per month based on a 38-hour working week, which will increase to €3,707 in the fourth year (salary scale P).
• You will receive an 8% holiday allowance and an 8,3% end-of-year bonus. 
• You will receive extra days off. With full-time employment, you can choose between 30 or 41 days of annual leave instead of the statutory 20. 

6. Practical information and applying

You can apply only via the button below. Address your letter of application to Silvia Mella. In the application form, you will find which documents you need to include with your application.

The first interviews will take place on Monday 21 April. You will preferably start your employment on 1 June 2025.

We can imagine you're curious about our application procedure. It describes what you can expect during the application procedure and how we handle your personal data and internal and external candidates.