Have a real-world security problem that could benefit from a research-driven solution? KU Leuven (campus Diepenbeek) and UHasselt (two Belgian universities) are currently looking for master’s thesis topics in the area of threat modeling or secure software engineering for students in the Engineering Technology program. A good thesis topic poses a clear, open research question, addresses a concrete problem relevant to your company, and includes an implementation component.It is possible to carry out the thesis as an internship, ideally with a Flanders-based company, though remote collaboration is also an option. This is a great chance to explore your security challenges with fresh academic insight. Interested in collaborating? Reach out to koen.yskout@kuleuven.be for more information.
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I think there are several good RQ that relate to conflict, especially with respect to interpersonal threats. (For example, see just released [2502.07116] Threat Me Right: A Human HARMS Threat Model for Technical Systems ) . Those questions include:
- pros and cons of different models (eg, compare to Abuse Vectors: A Framework for Conceptualizing IoT-Enabled Interpersonal Abuse | USENIX )
- What are we going to do about it? There’s a stream of good work helping people find problems, but what do we do?
- How can we operationalize what are we going to do about it? For example, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3633500.3633508 presents a great way to discover more possible issues, but neither that nor the HARMS paper leads to fixes in the way that Spoofing leads to Authentication options by being a violation of a property that has tooling.
I would actively recommend against LLM-oriented topics for masters students. There’s way too much being published, it’s all too long, it makes for bad topics, and if you do good work it’s hard to get past the noise.