Profile

Prof Achim D. Brucker

• Profile
• Publications
• PhD Supervision

Prof Achim D. Brucker

PhD Supervision

Group Website | Blog | @adbrucker | Google Scholar | DBLP | ORCID

I always welcome applications from self-funded PhD students in all areas of security, safety, trustworthiness, or reliability. This includes, but is not limited to, topics in one or more of the following ares: formal methods, information security, software security, security engineering (both, software and hardware), verification, testing, and combinations thereof.

For more information about pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Exeter, please visit the postgraduate research page of the department. If you want to be supervised by me, please contact me at least four weeks before you apply (and before the deadline). This allows us to discuss (and maybe adapt) project proposal. In your email (cover letter), please provide a short explanation why you want to be supervised by me, e.g.,

• For topics proposed by me: provide a brief explanation why you are interested in my proposal and what prior-knowledge of the area you have. Areas I am currently particularly interested in include (but are not limited to):
  • Cyber-physical Systems for safety- or security-critical applications.
  • Formal approaches to web browser security.
  • Security testing or reverse engineering.
  • Program analysis or fuzzing for improving the security, safety, correctness of software applications.
  • Open source security and secure software supply chains.
  • Theorem prover-based testing.
  • Verification or testing of security or correctness properties for non-standard computing architectures (e.g. quantum computing, FPGA, GPGPU).
  • Integrating Formal and Semi-Formal Aspects of System Development for Certification Processes
  • Formal approaches to security and privacy.
  • Trustworthy ML/AI for high-assurance Systems.
• For topics proposed by you: provide a brief explanation why I am the right person to supervise you, i.e., how does your proposal fit in my research (and where is my expertise beneficial). I also strongly recommend having a look on my publications and research. This should give you a good idea of the type of research I am interested in.

Ongoing PhD Projects

• Supervisor
  • Amy Stell, University of Exeter, UK.
  • Sakine Yalman, University of Exeter, UK.
• Co-Supervisor / 2nd Supervisor
  • Mustafa Albalushi, University of Exeter, UK.
  • Siqi Sun, University of Exeter, UK.
  • Billy Thornton, University of Exeter, UK.
  • Yangjun Ma, University of Exeter, UK

Completed PhD Projects

• Supervisor
  • Michael Herzberg,  Formal Foundations for Provably Safe Web Components. University of Sheffield, UK, 2019.
    Michael is now a Security Researcher at Citrix, UK.
• Co-Supervisor
  • Helmut Petritsch. Break-glass Access Control Policies. University of Regensburg, Germany, 2014.
    Helmut is now a Software Architect at iteratec GmbH in Vienna, Austria.
  • Michael Foster. Reverse Engineering Systems to Identify Flaws and Understand Behaviour. University of Sheffield, UK. 2020.
    Michael is now a post-doctoral research assistant at The University of Sheffield, UK.