Meeting with PhD students

Wednesday October 6th, CyberSchool students met PhD students who talked about their career path, their thesis subject and the environment they work. It was a real moment of exchange and sharing.

CyberSchool is keen to introduce students to the world of research and to make them aware of the possibility of continuing their studies after their Masters. Two doctoral students came to exchange with them: Daniel De Almeida Braga and Gwendal Patat.

Daniel De Almeida Braga is a PhD student since October 2019, under the supervision of Pierre-Alain Fouque (CyberSchool Director) and Mohamed Sabt (CyberSchool professor) in the SPICY team at IRISA in Rennes. His research focuses on vulnerabilities in cryptographic implementations, which can be related to the core protocol or implementation specific. The goal of his PhD is to outline the practicability of such vulnerabilities by implementing attacks in a real world scenario. Before starting his PhD, he graduated from the University of Rennes 1’s Cryptography Master in 2018 and worked one year at Amossys (Rennes) as a Security Analyst.

Gwendal Patat is a PhD student since October 2020, also under the supervision of Pierre-Alain Fouque and Mohamed Sabt in the SPICY team at IRISA in Rennes. The topic of his research is the security of cryptographic implementations within Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) especially ARM TrustZone-based ones in mobile devices. By using multiple reverse engineering techniques, he aims to find cryptographic vulnerabilities to provide Proof-of-Concept exploits in order to make sure that they will be fixed in future implementations. Before starting his PhD, he graduated from the University of Rennes 1’s Cybersecurity Master in 2020.