Aalto University is a community of bold thinkers where science and art meet technology and business. We are committed to identifying and solving grand societal challenges and building an innovative future. Aalto University has six schools with nearly 11 000 students and nearly 400 professors. Our campus is located in Espoo, Finland.

Several Diploma thesis positions open on Trust networking/cooperative security for 5G

Comnet Network Security and Trust group has developed the concepts of trust networking, cooperative firewalling and Customer Edge Switching (CES) that could be deployed in different industrial environments, among them to secure the Smart Grid. The concepts apply fine-grained security policies for filtering of packet flows in Software Defined Networks and are managed by a Restful interface. There is also an interworking solution for the legacy IP users called Realm Gateway that is both a source and destination Network Address Translator controlled by the security policies. The experimental software and the documentation for the whole concept is hosted by GitHub github.com/aalto5g and re2ee.org websites. You may also find some earlier papers in ResearchGate or public digital libraries such as IEEE explore.

Our research is experimental: in addition to writing research papers, we create SW prototypes to verify all parts of the solution before its deployment to the industrial environment. For experimentation, most work is done in virtualized Linux. We might also set up a mobile network base station on the same table with your computer and you would have a complete mobile network in your fingertips. The developed software is packaged into containers and virtual machines making the Firewall a cloud-based component. We have done most of the programming in Python, some in C but we are open to using other tools as well.

Now, in ongoing nationally funded projects (by Business Finland: 5G VIIMA, 5G FORCE and 5GTNF) we need to improve the feasibility of the security solutions applied to Smart Grid in several areas, among them:

• Orchestrating virtualized security for a Smart Grid administrator including an Admin user interface for setting and deploying the solution for Smart Grid.
• Automating the registration of 5G devices in a Smart Grid into CES by some means of integrating our SW with different open source 5G Core network implementations.
• Testing and improving the SW quality for better maintainability.
• Using CES for securing remote access to Smart grid over a secure SCION-based wide area network (SCION is proposed as a replacement of BGP).

From the candidates we expect sufficient programming and SW design skills; understanding of IP networks, virtualization or cloud computing, etc. A suitable background is given, e.g. by CCIS master’s program at Aalto, the SECCLO program at Aalto or similar.

The positions offer an entry into the Finnish 5G research community, access to a world class 5G research infrastructure (we have a research and education license on 3,6 - 3,7 GHz frequencies and the corresponding first 5G base station is on top of Väre building) and finally for you to contribute to creating a new approach to end system security that would offer low OPEX, professional management and an unprecedented level of security first to be applied in a corporate environment for machine to machine communication and possibly later in a wide range of use cases including consumer services in public mobile networks.

We pay a regular diploma thesis position salary.

Ready to apply?

Please submit your application through our recruiting system by using  "Apply now!" link below, by March 6th, 2020. Please include the following documents in your application: CV, study transcripts and other material that may be relevant for us in assessing your skills and potential. Make sure to describe your SW and network programming skills.