Description

Cyber Security/Reverse Engineer in the System Security Section (TEC-SES), End-to-End Systems Division, Systems Department, Directorate of Technology, Engineering and Quality.

The System Security Section is responsible for end-to-end system security engineering for the Agency’s missions, projects and activities across space, ground and user segments and communication links, at system, subsystem, element and equipment levels. Its responsibilities span the mission lifecycle from the study phase and definition of requirements to design, development, security integration and verification, and security service preparation, across the full stack, from the physical to the application layer.  

To fulfil these functions, the System Security Section defines and conducts the associated research and development (R&D) activities and studies and implements the necessary security engineering standards. 

Using its security laboratory facilities, the System Security Section performs vulnerability assessments across all areas within its remit and proposes detection methods and mitigation and protection measures using security assessment tools and equipment.

This position will support a third-party activity aimed at developing a national security assessment and evaluation laboratory capability.

Duties

Your tasks and responsibilities will include:

• supporting the Project Manager by providing recommendations, guidance and plans for test and evaluation laboratory capability development and technologies for security evaluation;
• regular reporting to the Project Manager on the status of the duties assigned under the project;
• engaging directly with and advising national customers and ESA experts on options for developing and maturing security evaluation capabilities;
• deriving technical requirements and reviewing, assessing and evaluating project proposals, including the security design, development, implementation, qualification and validation;
• fostering new security application areas for multidisciplinary activities, placing emphasis on innovative concepts and cutting-edge technologies in the field of reverse engineering and security evaluation laboratories;
• supporting laboratory activities as required;
• continuously following technological and scientific developments relevant to the position, particularly emerging threats, exploits and industry trends;
• contributing, as requested, to other technical activities beyond the main project within your area of expertise. 

Technical competencies

Behavioural competencies

Result Orientation
Operational Efficiency
Fostering Cooperation
Relationship Management
Continuous Improvement
Forward Thinking

For more information, please refer to the ESA Core Behavioural Competencies guidebook

Education and professional experience

A master’s degree in a relevant field and, in principle, three years of relevant professional experience are required for this post. Alternatively, candidates with a bachelor’s degree and an additional four years of relevant professional experience may be considered.

Additional requirements

Hands-on experience in reverse engineering, exploitation and vulnerability assessment across IT and embedded-system technologies, including but not limited to:

• binary analysis and static and dynamic analysis of native binaries;
• disassembly and decompilation;
• ELF and PE, with the ability to analyse proprietary formats;
• popular architectures such as ARM/ARM64, RISC-V and x86;
• secure boot, hardware root of trust and trusted execution environments and related vulnerabilities;
• OS processes, threads and virtual memory;
• firmware unpacking and repacking and identification of compression/encryption/encoding;
• system call tracing;
• strong C/C++ and assembly, with the ability to read unfamiliar C and assembly code fluently;
• cryptographic primitives and their implementation;
• capturing and analysing traffic, observing runtime behaviour, and network protocol analysis and dissecting.

Experience in the following areas would be beneficial:

• fuzzing;
• reversing code for other processor architectures or families, such as Motorola and Texas Instruments;
• microcode analysis;
• determination of microprocessor instruction sets from extracted binary;
• working with hardware evaluation teams, prototyping, debugging and simulation of changes to binaries for embedded systems.

Proficiency with Ghidra, IDA Pro, Binary Ninja, radare2, objdump/readelf, binwalk, QEMU, GDB, strace, tcpdump and Wireshark. Experience in modifying these tools and/or augmenting them with plugins, for example to support other processor architectures, is desirable.