Helsinki System Security Lab (HSSL) Internship (1H/2025 or summer 2025)

Enclaves: Secure hypervisors

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With the development of the IoT, modern embedded systems are evolving to general-purpose and mixed-criticality systems, where virtualization has become the key to guarantee the isolation between tasks with different criticality. Traditional server-based hypervisors (KVM and Xen) are difficult to use in embedded scenarios due to performance and security reasons. As a result, several new hypervisors have been proposed in recent years, which effectively solve the problems above through static partitioning. However, this inflexible resource isolation strategy assumes no resource sharing across guests, which greatly reduces the resource utilization and VM scalability. This prevents themselves from simultaneously fulfilling the differentiated demands from VMs conducting different tasks.

We are seeking a Master’s student for a thesis-based internship focusing on “Enclaves & Secure hypervisors.” The project aims to establish a secure environment based on ARM v9 CCA and RMM technologies that is both flexible in resource allocation without any security tradeoff. This position offers an opportunity to design and implement a comprehensive proof-of-concept, exploring advanced secure hypervisor and secure enclave applications.

The internship is well-suited also to Master’s thesis work.

We are looking for:

• Students who have completed most of their M.Sc. courses, in the field of CS/E.Eng
• Experience on programming languages such as C, C++, Python, or Rust.
• Familiarity with virtualization technologies.
• Sufficient skills to work and interact in English
• Good team-working skills
• Students with interest to do research and explore new challenges

The following we count as advantage:

• Knowledge of the ARM architecture and of ARM CCA virtualization technology.

Location and internship period: This is a 6-month internship based at our Helsinki, Ruoholahti office.

The Helsinki Systems Security Laboratory in Huawei Finland (HSSL) drives renewal and mastery in the field of platform / device related security technologies for the mobile device. Our topical expertise lies in hardware-assisted isolation and system protection (hypervisor, TEE, kernel hardening) as well as functions like device key management, attestation and integrity.