Internship/Lightweight Cryptography to Secure SCADA Wireless Communications (m/f)

Internship/Lightweight Cryptography to Secure SCADA Wireless Communications (m/f)

Internship/Lightweight Cryptography to Secure SCADA Wireless Communications (m/f)

Cassidian CyberSecurity Elancourt

European specialist in cyber security, Airbus Defence and Space mission is to protect companies, critical national infrastructures, as well as government and defence organisations against cyber threats. Its reliable and high performance security products and services are able to detect, analyse and neutralise the most sophisticated cyber-attacks.

Airbus Group is a global leader in aeronautics, space and related services. In 2015, the Group - comprising Airbus, Airbus Defence and Space and Airbus Helicopters - generated revenues of € 64.5 billion and employed a workforce of around 136,600.

Our people work with passion and determination to make the world a more connected, safer and smarter place. Taking pride in our work, we draw on each other's expertise and experience to achieve excellence. Our diversity and teamwork culture propel us to accomplish the extraordinary - on the ground, in the sky and in space.

Description of the job

Airbus Defence and Space CyberSecurity (Elancourt) is looking for an intern (m/f) for a 6-month internship.

Within Airbus Defence and Space CyberSecurity, you will join the Solutions Development team as an intern.
Your mission is to develop secure embedded system solutions that fully comply with the needs of its customers.
Specifically, one of its objectives is to make the execution of operations secure (data encryption, authentication, identification, etc.) from those persons potentially seeking to do harm.
You will be required to implant cryptographic primitives in security products.

This internship will start on 1st March 2017 (subject to some flexibility).

Internships at Airbus Group

Tasks & accountabilities

In this context, one of the Cryptography team's activities is to implant cryptography in the wireless sensors.
In very constrained environments such as industrial control systems (ICS) or data acquisition systems (SCADA), the implanted cryptography must be as transparent as possible for the system (surcharge on limited debit, low latency) in order to respect the real-time constraints of the systems.
However, in certain cases, these performance constraints cannot be respected by using standard encryption algorithms. It is in this context that it is often suggested to use the so-called "lightweight" algorithms with structural properties that would allow them to be better sized and suited to ICS-SCADA systems.
In addition, once these cryptographic algorithms are implanted, they must be resistant to physical attacks on components, the so-called “side-channel attacks”.
Through the analysis of certain characteristics of the target circuit (electrical consumption, electromagnetic radiation, etc.), these attacks through statistical analyses are able to find the encryption key embedded in the component.
To protect these implementations against this threat, it is necessary to introduce randomness in the calculations (the so-called “masking” method).
In short, your internship will propose the software implantation of lightweight and innovative encryption algorithms and protect Arduino micro-controller against these physical attacks.

The conduct and objectives of your internship will include:

·  Designing a network of existing sensors,
·  Implanting lightweight encryption algorithms,
·  Implementing counter-measures against side-channel attacks,
·  Validating security on test benches.

Required skills

You are in the final year of engineering school, completing a Master's degree or in 5th year of university, specialising in IT/Embedded Systems.

You ideally have initial experience in this field.

You are a good team player and you have excellent interpersonal skills.

English: intermediate level,
French: fluent.