Side Channel and Transient Execution Security on RISC V

Business Area/Country Unit

Saab Surveillance

Location

Paris/Saclay, Centre Interdisciplinaire d’Etudes de Défense et Sécurité (CIEDS), France

Type of Employment During PhD Project

Convention Industrielle de Formation par la Recherche (CIFRE/CDI)

Your Role

In this position, you will conduct doctoral research in IP Paris top research groups in close collaboration with Saab experts. Your research topic will be defined together with professors and will relate to security and safety aspects in future network systems. This PhD position focuses on discovering or experimentally validating the absence of timing side‑channel attacks and transient execution vulnerabilities on RISC‑V hardware. You will examine scenarios where workloads are isolated using partitioning kernels such as seL4 or S3K. The project offers hands‑on work in hardware‑level security testing and analysis of modern open CPU architectures. As an additional task, you may also experimentally validate hardware assumptions crucial for WCET analyses of safety‑critical software. The role is well‑suited for candidates interested in combining systems security, hardware architecture, and experimental research.

You will be employed permanently by Saab, but you will spend most of your time at IP Paris (CIEDS) academic research at the Saclay campus. You will also participate in Saab’s internal product development projects.

Your Profile

You may already have several years of experience in industry, or you may be a recently graduated Master of Science in Computer Science or equivalent. You are motivated to work in an environment where long‑term research aims to achieve significant technological innovations and breakthroughs. You are creative and enthusiastic, able to deliver results and challenge existing solutions. Your merits and academic performance are strong enough to gain admission to doctoral studies at IP Paris.

We expect fluent French and English skills, as both languages are used daily in our international company. You have:

• Strong expertise in networking, computer science and computer security in general and more specifically Micro‑architectural design and low‑level cybersecurity.

The position requires a willingness to travel as needed, in France, Sweden, and internationally.

Security Requirements

This position requires that you pass a security vetting based on the current regulations around/of security protection. For positions requiring security clearance additional obligations on citizenship may apply.

Kindly observe that this is an ongoing recruitment process and that the position might be filled before the closing date of the advertisement.