Senior Hardware Security Engineer

The MITRE Corporation•Albuquerque, NM

3d•$126,800 - $190,200•Onsite

About The Position

At MITRE, your passion fuels work that impacts our nation and improves lives. This is where your skills strengthen national security, cybersecurity, health, transportation, and citizen services. We’re a nonprofit engineering, applied research, and advanced technology organization working in the public interest. With objectivity and integrity at our core, we lead federally funded research and development centers for U.S. government agencies – collaborating with industry and academia to deliver integrated, high-impact solutions that advance our nation’s health, security, and prosperity. Our people tackle the toughest technical challenges, supported by competitive benefits, meaningful career development, and a culture of innovation, collaboration, and technical excellence. Choose MITRE for a career with purpose — and help shape the future. MIRTE’s Electronic Systems Security department is seeking to hire talented and creative hardware reverse engineers with a focus on embedded systems. Our researchers tackle the most complex, challenging, and impactful embedded security problems of our customers on projects of national significance. We conduct in-depth technical assessments on embedded operation, research security vulnerabilities, develop exploit proofs-of-concept, and deliver technical capabilities to defend and enable our customers’ missions. Our successes have driven and continue to drive us to develop advanced tools that enable, accelerate, and scale our embedded system vulnerability research and reverse engineering analyses as well as bring differentiated value to our customers. Qualified candidates will join a department with deep technical expertise across many embedded security disciplines including hardware reverse engineering and vulnerability research, secure computing, and implementation security. Together, this multi-disciplinary group performs hands-on research and analysis and develops proof-of-concept prototypes to demonstrate and advance the state-of-the-art in embedded security.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field and 5 years of related experience; or Master’s degree/PhD in a similar field and 3 years of related experience
Typically requires a minimum of 5 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 3 years and a Master’s degree; or a PhD with relevant experience who can immediately contribute at this job step; or equivalent combination of related education and work experience.
Knowledge of semiconductor devices, integrated circuit fabrication processes, and common IC structures
Understanding of digital circuit design topics - including hardware description languages, microelectronics, VLSI design automation, and computer architecture
Understanding of protections against physical attacks including secure boot, tamper sensing, secure key storage, memory encryption/authentication, and debug interface disablement
Ability to independently execute complex technical work in collaborative environments
Effective oral and written communication skills
Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a Secret U.S Government issued Security Clearance. Per the U.S. Government’s eligibility requirements, you must be a U.S Citizen to be considered for a security clearance.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field
Active security clearance, especially Top Secret or TS/SCI.
Demonstrated technical leadership and mentoring experience
Experience with: Embedded system tear-down, reverse engineering, vulnerability analysis, and circuit/component modifications
Anti-tamper design, implementation, evaluation, and/or research
ASIC and/or FPGA design
Netlist recreation of printed circuit boards and components using X-ray or destructive imaging
Board- and component-level instrumentation, measurement, and protocol analysis
Prototyping printed circuit boards for probing or injecting high-speed signals
Software development (e.g., C/C++, Python)
Digital signal and image processing
Computer vision and machine learning
Familiarity with: Semiconductor depackaging, delayering, failure analysis, and FIB-SEM techniques
Application of side-channel analysis and/or fault injection to black-box systems
Analysis of cryptographic algorithms and protocols
Analysis of RF protocols
Analysis of security architectures of modern commercial processors and SoCs
Embedded firmware reverse engineering

Responsibilities

Perform hands-on security assessments of embedded systems, e.g. by Analyzing scanning electron microscope (SEM) imagery to identify and interpret microelectronic structures, including interconnects, vias, contacts, transistors, and other features within integrated circuits
Correlating physical integrated circuit structures with schematics, layouts, netlists, or expected circuit functionality
Non-volatile memory extraction
Designing and building prototypes to demonstrate advanced capabilities for measuring and instrumenting board- and component-level interfaces
Advance the state-of-the-art in hardware security by researching and developing new approaches for, and countermeasures to, emerging threats to embedded systems
Track, adapt, and apply academic and industry advances in hardware security analysis and protection techniques to secure our sponsors’ systems
Collaborate with multidisciplinary teams conducting embedded security research, vulnerability assessment, and hardware/software co-design
Work as part of a multi-disciplinary team, while leading tasks and/or teams of engineers
Communicate and document technical approaches, risks, and results to sponsors and stakeholders
Provide technical mentorship to junior engineers