Student assignments
COSSAS internships and graduation assignments
The COSSAS partners offer a continuous flow of student assignments to drive the further development of particular software components. Below is an overview of assignments that are currently available, each with reference to the issuing organization that will also be supervising the work. Interested students are encouraged to approach us via our contact channels.
Self-Healing for Cyber Security 2.0
Cyber-security technology has matured strongly in multiple areas of expertise, including cyber threat intelligence, monitoring & detection and automated response. Adversaries, however, have also evolved, a.o. by increasingly using stealth malware techniques and automating their attacks. This “cyber rat race” consumes ever increasing defensive resources and raises the question how to break the vicious circle. A new perspective in this continuous battle is provided by the concept of “self-healing for cyber security” (SH4CS). The SH4CS software that was developed to this end integrates containerization, monitoring and deployment tools into a platform of self-healing containers. As such SH4CS paves the way towards autonomous cyber-security.
What will you do?
For the duration of this assignment, you will be the main developer of the SH4CS_2.0 software in a broader team of cyber security specialists at TNO. SH4CS provides an inspiring starting point for a new perception of cyber defensive measures, with several directions for further exploration and development. The objective of this assignment is to redesign the SH4CS architecture and software to reflect feedback from the cyber security community as well as exploit opportunities offered by emerging service mesh software. This should result in a more widely deployable SH4CS_2.0 solution that offers turn-key deployment of self-healing capabilities in cloud-based Kubernetes services (e.g. AKS, EKS or GKE). The updated software components will again be released as open source through the COSSAS initiative.
What do we expect from you?
For this assignment it is expected that you:
- are keen to contribute to state-of-the-art cyber security technologies and publish the results of your design and development work
- have a solid understanding of cyber security concepts and automation of cyber security operations in particular;
- have experience with software engineering, i.e. programming skills (e.g. Python), familiarity with software quality assurance and the ability to select appropriate cloud native/ Kubernetes oriented solutions (e.g. Falco and Istio from the CNCF landscape)
- some experience with the Kubernetes platform software and APIs will be very helpful.
Study curriculum
Cyber / information security or related study curriculum (including software engineering) at academic level.