Research Assistant - Automatically discovering sanitizers and security-sensitive functions for Node.js applications

Job description

This job code is utilized for the majority of our temporary hires. The individual is performing hourly job duties as defined under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Desired profile

Qualifications :

This internship will explore the use of machine-learning techniques to automatically identify sanitizers, security-sensitive sources and sinks in the source code of Node.js applications. Because sanitizers, sources and sinks and are often specified manually, running vulnerability detection tools can be labour-intensive. These problems are exacerbated in Node.js applications because they usually consist of many third-party modules that are unfamiliar to the application developers.

In order to use machine learning techniques in this project, first we need to identify suitable syntactic and semantic features for classifying sanitizers, sources and sinks. Those features can be extracted and represented with some program analysis tools. Next we need to prepare training data from Node.js JavaScript source code. It may involve some work of manual labelling or annotating. Finally, we need to explore various supervised learning techniques, including classifiers using recurrent neural networks to find sanitizers, sources and sinks.

Supervisors: Behnaz Hassanshahi, Francois Gauthier, Alexander Jordan, Yang Zhao

Duties
You will:
* work independently, with guidance from your supervisors, to explore a state-of-the-art solution to identify sanitizers and security-sensitive functions with supervised machine learning techniques
* meet with your supervisors regularly for guidance and discussion about ways to solve the problem
* attend team meetings and give updates on your work
* present your findings and outcomes to the group.

Prerequisites
You will be expected to:
* be undertaking a PhD in Machine Learning or related topic
* have excellent programming skills in JavaScript, and python/C++
* have excellent software engineering skills
* demonstrate ability to work independently and collaboratively.

Benefits
* These positions are paid at current industry rates.
* Travel and visa costs for overseas applicants will be reimbursed.
* Ongoing learning is fundamental to our daily work to keep us at the cutting edge.
* International speakers visit and present their research to us.

Contact Paddy Krishnan for more details. The
position will commence interviewing immediately and remain open until filled.