PhD - Hardware Security for Smart Electric Vehicles

(ref. BAP-2022-446)

Laatst aangepast : 21/06/2022

KU Leuven Faculty of Engineering Technology organises bachelor and master degrees in Engineering Technology on six campuses across Flanders, Belgium. This vacancy is situated in the research group Emerging technologies, Systems & Security at campus Diepenbeek.

Project

Following the pledges for carbon-neutral pledge and the Paris Climate Agreement, countries have pushed for smart electric vehicles (SEV). With over 100 million lines of code managing multiple safety-critical tasks like steering, braking, and self-driving, SEVs are becoming increasingly reliant on software. As software complexity grows, the number of issues affecting automotive safety-critical processes grows. Overwhelming SEV growth not only opens the door for better user satisfaction, but it also creates a fear of potential data theft and cyber-attacks like the Jeep-hack and the Charging station attack. With the increased availability of wireless interfaces and software integration, an attacker can get access to a vehicle's communication network and exploit vulnerabilities in Electronic Control Units (ECUs). Vehicle makers have logically separated in-vehicle networks into sub-networks to safeguard important systems against such attacks. However, attackers can still physically exploit numerous sub-networks and the CAN-bus. Thus, maintaining the sanity of the systems is an exigent task. In this PhD project, we aim to develop intrusion detection systems and hardware-level protection mechanisms that take on the challenge of protecting in-vehicle networks.

Profile

• You have a master’s degree in electrical engineering or engineering technology. 
  
• You have good basic knowledge and hands-on experience in digital electronics. 
• You can work independently and pro-actively, well-organized, accurate and stress resistant. 
• You are analytical, flexible, result-oriented, customer and market oriented. 
• You are an enthusiastic and enterprising team player with innovative ideas that searches for improvements, experiments with new concepts and solves problems in a creative and clear manner. 
• You want to dedicate yourself to spreading the mission and values of the faculty: you are open to other cultures and world views and you are motivated to work internationally.

Offer

The successful candidate will be offered a PhD fellowship to become part of our team to work towards a PhD. This full-time mandate has an initial duration of one year which can be prolonged depending on competitive financing successes. The final goal will be obtaining a PhD after four years.

Interested?

For more information please contact Prof. dr. ir. Nele Mentens, tel.: +32 11 75 17 62, mail: [email protected].

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