PhD Candidate in Advanced Physical Security of Embedded Systems

This is NTNU NTNU is a broad-based university with a technical-scientific profile and a focus in professional education. The university is located in three cities with headquarters in Trondheim. At NTNU, 9,000 employees and 43,000 students work to create knowledge for a better world. You will find more information about working at NTNU and the application process here.     Video: https://youtu.be/Xt-yHCN5QS0 About the position Are you motivated to take a step towards a doctorate and open up exciting career opportunities? As a PhD Candidate with us, you will work to achieve your doctorate, and at the same time gain valuable experience that qualifies you for a further career in higher education and research, in and outside academia. Department of Information Security and Communication Technology (IIK) at NTNU Gjøvik is seeking a highly motivated candidate for a full-time PhD position in Advanced Physical Security of Embedded Systems.  You will become part of an active and interdisciplinary cybersecurity research environment and have the opportunity to collaborate with researchers working across hardware security, embedded systems, cybersecurity, and digital forensics. A significant part of the research will be carried out in the Hardware security and Reverse Engineering Laboratory (HRE Lab), providing the candidate with access to advanced experimental infrastructure and opportunities to contribute to the further development of the laboratory’s research and educational activities. You will work in a collaborative research environment with opportunities for scientific publications, international collaboration, conference participation, and development of hands-on experimental expertise. Your immediate leader will be the Head of Discipline.  About the project Modern embedded systems increasingly rely on cryptographic implementations and hardware-supported security mechanisms to protect sensitive information, trusted operations, and critical functionality. While cryptographic algorithms and software-level protections may be theoretically secure, their physical implementation can introduce vulnerabilities that are not visible at the algorithmic level. Sensitive information may leak through power consumption, electromagnetic emissions, timing behaviour, memory or bus activity, while manipulation of voltage, clock, or electromagnetic conditions can cause security mechanisms to behave in unintended ways. At the same time, modern embedded architectures increasingly integrate processors, memories, peripherals, hardware accelerators, security components, and multiple clock and power domains. Interactions between these elements may introduce new and insufficiently understood physical attack surfaces, creating a need for more systematic methods to evaluate and assure the physical security of embedded systems. This PhD project aims to advance physical security evaluation and hardware security assurance for embedded systems by combining advanced side-channel analysis, fault-injection techniques, AI- and machine-learning-assisted analysis, robustness evaluation, and quantitative security assessment. The research will investigate how physical vulnerabilities arise, how to systematically discover and characterise them, and how to evaluate their practical security impact. This will include established and emerging physical attack mechanisms such as power and electromagnetic side channels, voltage/clock/EM fault injection, and combined attacks, as well as leakage and fault behaviour associated with timing and clock mechanisms, memory and buses, peripherals, hardware accelerators, cryptographic implementations, and interactions between architectural domains. AI and machine learning will be explored as enabling technologies for automated leakage detection and localization, analysis of complex measurements, fault-response characterization, intelligent exploration of large experimental spaces, and adaptive selection of security experiments. The research will be strongly experimental and will utilize the advanced side-channel analysis and fault-injection infrastructure available in the Hardware Reverse Engineering Laboratory (HRE Lab) at NTNU, together with its hardware analysis and reverse-engineering capabilities. The candidate will design and conduct controlled experiments to investigate vulnerability mechanisms, validate physical attacks, evaluate security countermeasures, and study whether security observations remain valid across different devices, implementations, operating conditions, and experimental configurations. Classical and emerging cryptographic implementations, secure embedded platforms, hardware accelerators, and post-quantum cryptographic implementations may be used as representative experimental targets where relevant. The candidate will also contribute to developing automated measurement and analysis workflows, benchmark implementations and datasets, reproducible experimental procedures, and reusable physical-security testbeds. This will strengthen the HRE Lab as a sustainable experimental platform for advanced hardware security research, future PhD and master’s projects, education, and collaborative research. The overall ambition is to move beyond individual demonstrations of whether a particular physical attack succeeds or fails toward robust, quantitative, and evidence-based hardware security assurance. The project will investigate how experimental evidence generated through side-channel analysis, fault injection, implementation analysis, robustness testing, and countermeasure evaluation can be transformed into measurable, reproducible, and traceable indicators of hardware security. Such evidence may characterise information leakage, attack effort and complexity, fault susceptibility, countermeasure effectiveness, robustness across devices and operating conditions, reproducibility, and the uncertainty and confidence associated with security conclusions. The longer-term goal is to establish scientific methods and experimental foundations that enable the security of hardware implementations to be systematically measured, compared, and supported by defensible evidence, thereby providing a foundation for future automated hardware security evaluation and quantitative assurance, as well as continued research, laboratory development, industry collaboration, and innovation in trustworthy embedded and cyber-physical systems. Duties of the position • Complete the doctoral education leading to a PhD degree, including required academic training corresponding to a minimum of 30 ECTS. • Conduct high-quality experimental research in advanced physical security of embedded systems, including the design, implementation, and evaluation of side-channel analysis, fault-injection methods, emerging physical attack mechanisms, combined attacks, and relevant countermeasures. • Develop AI/ML-assisted and quantitative approaches for hardware security evaluation and assurance, including automated experimentation and analysis, robustness and reproducibility assessment, and the development of reusable experimental platforms, datasets, methodologies, and testbeds within the HRE Lab. • Publish research results in high-quality international peer-reviewed journals and conferences and contribute to relevant scientific and popular-science dissemination. • Participate actively in the research group and department and engage in relevant international activities, including conferences, research collaboration, and research stays abroad. • Contribute to teaching, supervision, assessment, and academic development activities according to the requirements of the position. Required selection criteria • You must meet the requirements for admission to the faculty's Doctoral Programme , see  Section 6-1 of the PhD regulations for more information. • You must have a relevant Master's degree in in information security, cybersecurity, electronics engineering, electrical engineering,