Doctoral student in Computer Science: AI Runtime Security Assurance
About this role
Örebro University and the School of Science and Technology are looking for a doctoral student (PhD student) for the doctoral programme in Computer Science, concluding with a doctoral degree.
Start date: 1st of May 2026
Project description
The multi-disciplinary centre for cyber resilient AI, RESIST, is a national effort funded by the Swedish Strategic Research Foundation (SSF) to bring together leading researchers in AI and cybersecurity to develop novel solutions to cyber resilient AI for the benefit of Swedish industry and society. The vision is to make Sweden a role model in secure trustworthy AI by pioneering cyber resilience across the AI lifecycle. The research program focuses on four key themes: Trustworthy and Verifiable AI, Runtime Security Assurance, Robust and Secure AI-Supported Development, and Resilient Distributed and Agentic AI. RESIST will drive world-class research in the intersection between AI and cybersecurity through a strong, stimulating and well connected international research environment. Research outcomes will be validated in realworld scenarios with industry and public-sector partners. RESIST will also serve as a national hub for cyber resilient AI, promoting education, knowledge sharing, and policy development.
This PhD position is associated with the research theme Runtime Security Assurance.
Once trained, AI models can be deployed in a variety of environments, ranging from public repositories such as Hugging Face, to proprietary cloud-based platforms, following the Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) paradigm. These models, whether convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks, large language models (LLMs), or large reasoning models (LRMs), are designed to respond at inference phase to user-provided inputs with meaningful outputs. However, this significantly broadens the attack surface, increasing the risk of inference-time threats that exploit model interactions with external queries. These threats can undermine robu