Master Thesis 2018: Security implications in IOT i Göteborg

We want You for Thesis work at Ericsson in Göteborg!

Background

How could millions of seemingly harmless devices with, individually, little to no capacity of disturbing a country-wide mobile network, deny service to millions of users? Up until recently, the vast majority of devices are personally owned and operated by a human being. This means that every device is in some way observed and taken care of by an individual, limiting the number of devices in an active network to the number of customers or number of people in a geographical area.
By IoT hacking we do not mean the effects of hacking an individual IoT device (although knowing more about hacking individual devices will probably lead to more, valuable, insights) such as a surveillance camera or temperature meter. We mean the effects that a hacker could have on an entire network.

Thesis Description
What happens when the number of devices grows exponentially? User equipment (UE) in a network will no longer be personally owned and operated by an individual but will rather be present to serve some other, trivial purpose. Such as monitoring the temperature level inside a warehouse. The applications for such devices are endless, anything that can be monitored will, meaning that the number of devices will be equally endless.

An increase in UE count this massive introduces new challenges for network operators and vendors to tackle. What security concerns could suddenly be relevant due to this increase?
How easy is it to gain access to a generic IoT device? What kind of security protocols are used and how can these protocols help to protect the network? Ericsson would like you to dig deep into the possible problems that massive IoT presents for the modern day mobile networks. This will include analyzing current network behavior, inspecting IoT devices and how they interact with the network as well as reviewing the effect that they might have in numbers or even individually.

Qualifications

This project aims at students in electrical engineering, computer science, computer engineering or similar. Background in information security is preferred.

You need to have excellent analytical and organizational ability.

You can handle amiguity.

Extent

2 student, 30hp

Location

Ericsson AB Lindholmen, Gothenburg

Preferred Starting Date

Early 2018

Keywords
Secure Coding

Contact

In case of questions, please contact the Hiring Manager: Nada Abdul-Hak, or Recruitment Specialist: Monal Jain, monal.jain@ericsson.com

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Primary country and city: Sweden (SE) || || Göteborg || IT; ProdMgt

Req ID: 216731