"PhD Position: Trustworthy Authorization & Compliance"

Job description

Are you excited about building cybersecurity platforms that are secure, explainable, and compliant by design? Do you want to combine real-time authorization, distributed ledgers, and verifiable credentials with ethics- and regulation-aware engineering? Would you enjoy turning cutting-edge research into practical capabilities for essential service providers across Europe? If so, join us for an exciting PhD opportunity.

Challenge:

Design a just-in-time authorization and usage control stack that reacts to dynamic risk signals while guaranteeing legality, privacy, and ethical safeguards across organizations.

Change:

Operationalize DLT-backed policies, smart contracts, and verifiable credentials to enforce context-aware access and provenance in the experimentation laboratory.

Impact:

Help essential entities meet NIS2, GDPR, and related obligations, reducing cyber risk while increasing transparency, trust, and auditability.

Within the EU CIPHER project, an experimentation laboratory where essential service providers can assess and strengthen cyber-resilience, your PhD will unite two strands: (i) ethics- and regulation-aware engineering that turns EU frameworks into concrete design requirements, and (ii) just-in-time authorization that enforces real-time, risk-adaptive usage control across organizations. You will design a usage-control pipeline that evaluates every data request against dynamic context, encodes policies as smart contracts on blockchain for transparent, tamper-evident enforcement, and integrates verifiable credentials for cross-border trust. Coupled with a Security Response Manager, the system adapts permissions on the fly. You will also develop compliance-aware guidance and tooling, link authorization to regulatory duties via a checker, and ensure provenance and lifecycle metadata for auditability and continuous monitoring.

The research is hands-on and evaluative. You will deploy your methods in realistic cyber-range scenarios and sectoral use cases (e.g., transport, telecommunications, water), demonstrating end-to-end workflows from risk monitoring to authorization and compliance reporting. Throughout the project, you will collaborate closely with cybersecurity engineers, legal/ethics experts, and industry partners; co-supervise master’s students where appropriate; and publish your results at leading venues in security, distributed systems, and responsible/regulated AI.

Job requirements

• MSc in Computer Science, Computer/Software Engineering, or a closely related field.
• Proven skills in access control/usage control (e.g. ABAC/UCON/RBAC) and Blockchain Hyperledger Fabric, Indy, Besu.
• Solid programming ability (Python, Go, Java, Solidity, TypeScript) and software engineering practices.
• Interest or experience with research collaboration with other researchers and external stakeholders as a team player.
• High motivation and a curious and critical mindset.

Conditions of employment

Doctoral candidates will be offered a 4-year period of employment in principle, but in the form of 2 employment contracts. An initial 1,5 year contract with an official go/no go progress assessment within 15 months. Followed by an additional contract for the remaining 2,5 years assuming everything goes well and performance requirements are met.

Salary and benefits are in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities, increasing from €3059 - €3881 gross per month, from the first year to the fourth year based on a fulltime contract (38 hours), plus 8% holiday allowance and an end-of-year bonus of 8.3%.

As a PhD candidate you will be enrolled in the TU Delft Graduate School. The TU Delft Graduate School provides an inspiring research environment with an excellent team of supervisors, academic staff and a mentor. The Doctoral Education Programme is aimed at developing your transferable, discipline-related and research skills.

The TU Delft offers a customisable compensation package, discounts on health insurance, and a monthly work costs contribution. Flexible work schedules can be arranged.

Will you need to relocate to the Netherlands for this job? TU Delft is committed to make your move as smooth as possible! The HR unit, Coming to Delft Service, offers information on their website to help you prepare your relocation. In addition, Coming to Delft Service organises events to help you settle in the Netherlands, and expand your (social) network in Delft. A Dual Career Programme is available, to support your accompanying partner with their job search in the Netherlands.

Additional information

For more information about this vacancy, please contact dr. ir. Marcela Tuler de Oliveira (M.TulerdeOliveira@tudelft.nl) or dr. Carlos Hernandez Ganan (C.HernandezGanan@tudelft.nl)

For more information about the application procedure, please contact the HR-advisor (recruitment-tbm@tudelft.nl).

Application procedure

Are you interested in this vacancy? Please apply no later than 3 December 2025 via the application button and upload the following documents:

• Your detailed CV, including a list of publications, the title of your thesis, and contact details of two references.
• A motivational letter.
• Abstract of your MSc thesis or a paper that you have written in which you demonstrate your writing (and scientific) skills.

You can address your application to Marcela Tuler de Oliveira and Jolien Ubacht.

Doing a PhD at TU Delft requires English proficiency at a certain level to ensure that the candidate is able to communicate and interact well, participate in English-taught Doctoral Education courses, and write scientific articles and a final thesis. For more details please check the Graduate Schools Admission Requirements.