KEY TAKEAWAYS

• 
  Hours
  40 hr.
• 
  Salary indication
  Salary gross/monthly
  based on full-time
  € 3,059 - € 3,881
• 
  Deadline
  14 Sep 2025
  The Domain Name System (DNS) plays a central role in the Internet’s
  infrastructure. Its distributed nature has enabled global scalability, but it also introduces risks
  that undermine resilience. Delegations in the DNS namespace form long and often opaque
  supply chains, increasing the attack surface and introducing potential single points of failure.
  In today’s landscape, many organizations rely on third-party DNS services without full
  visibility into what lies beneath. These managed services often depend on other providers,
  recursively forming complex supply chains that are difficult to analyze. As a result, operators
  may unknowingly introduce technical, operational, and regulatory risks – especially in critical
  domains such as e-government, healthcare, and finance – where compliance with frameworks
  like NIS2 and DORA is increasingly more essential.
  This project aims to analyze and map these hidden dependencies from a technical and scientific
  perspective. The Ph.D. candidate will develop methods for uncovering DNS infrastructure
  dependencies at scale, relying on active measurements and graph-based analysis. The focus will
  be on designing reproducible techniques for identifying dependency structures, validating these
  methods through large-scale experimentation, and evaluating how well DNS configurations align
  with recommended best practices.
  Key research activities include designing and implementing DNS measurement methodologies
  focused on identifying hidden dependencies, analyzing large-scale DNS and infrastructure
  data, and building visual tools to support the interpretation and communication of results.
  The work has a strong foundation in systems and network research, with an emphasis on DNS
  protocol behavior, resolver interactions, and dependency modeling.
  This project builds on ongoing collaborations with both national and international partners,
  including SIDN and TNO in the Netherlands, CAIDA in the United States, and IIJ in Japan.
  The candidate will be part of the Design and Analysis of Communication Systems (DACS)
  https://www.utwente.nl/en/eemcs/dacs/ group at the University of Twente and will work
  under the supervision of Dr. ir. Raffaele Sommese and Dr. ir. Mattijs Jonker from DACS
  and Dr. Abhishta Abhishta from the High-tech Business and Entrepreneurial (HBE) https://
  www.utwente.nl/en/bms/organisation/departments-institutes/department-hbe/ group of the University of Twente.

Please refer the Job description for details