Internship Program Azure Research Intern - Security and Privacy

Security and privacy are among the most significant concerns for enterprises and consumers using public cloud and AI platforms. Azure Research is conducting pioneering research in the design and analysis of systems that guarantee strong security and privacy properties to cloud users, and in novel applications that are enabled by emerging security and privacy technology.

As part of our research, we are working on:

• Techniques to guarantee safety and reliability of agentic AI systems,
• Verification of cryptographic protocols and security-critical code, including AI-assisted verification,
• Using AI agents to assist with verification of distributed protocols and formalise systems research,
• Designing and building confidential computing platforms and low-level systems,
• Designing and building confidential computing and distributed systems, including secure multi-user AI inference and fault-tolerant protocols,
• Techniques that apply deterministic tools to improve efficiency and reliability of LLM-based vulnerability scanners,
• Testing for microarchitectural side-channel attacks and developing techniques for CPU fuzzing.

We place strong emphasis on systems that can be deployed at scale in the real world. We work in close collaboration with external and internal research organisations, as well as with Microsoft product teams. Our current focus areas include confidential computing systems, secure distributed computing, secure agentic AI, software security, microarchitectural security, and formal verification. Please find more information about our group and its work through the publications and projects pages.

Required Qualifications:  

• Students enrolled in a PhD program or outstanding undergraduate/master’s students with research experience. 
• One or two papers at top security conferences (e.g., USENIX, CCS, S&P, NDSS) or papers focusing on security, safety, or privacy and appearing at top venues on machine learning (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR), systems (e.g., SOSP, OSDI, NSDI, ATC, EuroSys), computer architecture (e.g., ISCA, ASPLOS, MICRO), or programming languages (e.g., PLDI, POPL, OOPSLA) is strongly desired.  .