Two PhD positions in Privacy-preserving Biometric Authentication at Chalmers University of Technology

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering is a joint department at Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg, with activities on two campuses in the city of Gothenburg. The department has around 270 employees from over 30 countries. Our research has a wide span, from theoretical foundations to applied systems development. We provide high quality education at Bachelor's, Master's and graduate levels, offering over 120 courses each year. We also have extensive national and international collaborations with academia, industry and society.

We are looking for an excellent, motivated, self-driven doctoral student to work in the area of information security and cryptography. The position is for five years at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, within the division of Networks and Systems and the Systems Security group, who are doing research on fields ranging from secure and private computing, cryptographic primitives, secure and private machine and or distributed learning, vehicular security, authentication, intrusion detection and response.

Major responsibilities
The PhD students will join Prof. Mitrokotsa's group focusing on security and cryptography, working in the area of privacy-preserving biometric authentication and within the Marie Curie ITN project: "TRESPASS-ETN: Training in Secure and Privacy-preserving biometrics". Privacy-preserving biometric authentication focuses on guaranteeing accurate biometric authentication, while at the same time providing strong privacy guarantees (e.g., avoid tracking, profiling of users and leakage of sensitive information). The focus of one of the PhD positions would be to examine how to guarantee privacy-preservation in biometric authentication systems by employing advanced cryptographic methods such as secure multiparty computation (SMPC) primitives (e.g., homomorphic encryption) and verifiable computation (when biometric authentication is applied in a distributed setting). The second PhD position will focus on employing differentially private mechanisms in the biometric authentication process. The goal is to achieve high accuracy in the authentication process, while at the same time avoid any leakage of information.

The PhD student will be supervised by Prof. Katerina Mitrokotsa in the area of information security and cryptography.

Position summary
Full-time temporary employment. PhD student positions are limited to five years and normally include 20 per cent departmental work, mostly teaching duties. Salary for the position is as specified in Chalmers' general agreement for PhD student positions. Currently the starting salary is 30,000 SEK a month before tax. The position is intended to start in Sept. 2020.

Further details:
Two PhD positions in Privacy-preserving Biometric Authentication at Chalmers University of Technology