PhD in Cybersecurity

The National Doctoral School in Cybersecurity (CySec-PhD) aims at forming a new generation of scholars, and future decision makers, who can support and increase the resilience of citizens, public institutions, and businesses to cyber-attacks, by developing and properly implementing digital processes and infrastructures that are more secure and reliable. Upon completion of their studies, PhD candidates will have been trained to tackle the growing complexity of cyberattacks, exploiting holistic approaches spanning technological, economic, human, social, and legal aspects.

To reach such a goal, the PhD-CySec program puts forward a strong multi- and inter-disciplinary approach providing a basic exposure to all such wide-ranging spectrum of competences and focusing on four key thematic Specialization Curricula:

1. Foundational Aspects in Cybersecurity
2. Software, System, and Infrastructure Security
3. Data Governance & Protection
4. Human, Economic, and Legal Aspects in Cybersecurity

PhD candidates will learn how to approach cybersecurity issues from different perspectives within an inter- and multi-disciplinary team of experts from other fields. During their educational training, candidates will be given the possibility to face and tackle real-world case studies by actors and stakeholders in the field both from the private and from the public sector. All activities will be conducted in English, including the PhD-thesis writing and its defense and candidates will be required to have a good knowledge of the English language.
For further information, please visit IMT website

For the academic year 2022/2023, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna will offer a PhD Scholarship related to the Specialization Curriculum “Software, System, and Infrastructure Security”. The objective of the research activities is the study of detection techniques for cyber-attacks and system-level defense mechanisms (e.g., at the level of the operating system, hypervisor, or in the context of compilers or neural inference engines). The mechanisms to be designed will be devoted to the embedded systems domain and, as such, will be required to be efficient in terms of resource usage and time predictable. The research activities will be carried out at the ReTiS Laboratory of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, where the student will have the opportunity to develop prototypes of the designed mechanisms and perform experimental evaluations on modern embedded computing platforms, also in the context of applications such as autonomous vehicles.