A colleague of mine has a fully-funded PhD studentship available in web security and intrusion detection.

PhD Studentship in Immuno-inspired Web Intrusion Detection

We invite applicants for a 3 year funded PhD position at the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde. The increase in the number of reported cyber-attacks and the sophistication of their techniques is driving developments in Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) that are able to detect them in order to take action against them. Despite significant success in the detection of previously known attacks (misuse detection) our ability to reliably detect novel attacks remains limited. In this context, it has long been observed that the role of IDS in computer systems is analogous to the role of the Human Immune System (HIS), and models of HIS operation have inspired IDS techniques. Taking inspiration from the HIS Danger Theory model (DT), we have proposed distress detection as a symptom-based approach to IDS. A key challenge for investigations in this area is the lack of appropriate experimental testbeds and datasets. Existing datasets do not include the symptoms of cyber-attacks, while testbeds are limited in their ability to capture those symptoms. In order to address this challenge the aim of this project is to develop an experimental testbed for the exploration of symptom-based Web IDS. The studentship will start in October 2011 and covers University Home fees plus a student stipend for 3 years (c. £13,590 for 2011/12). The work will be co-supervised by Dr Sotirios Terzis and Dr Marc Roper. All applicants must possess or be about to obtain a 1st class or 2.1 Honours degree or equivalent in a relevant discipline. The type of candidate sought will have strong technical computer science/technical skills, ideally some experience web system administration and low-level systems programming, an enthusiasm for research coupled with a dogged persistence, a broad outlook and the ability to explore new ideas in depth, an ability to rapidly absorb new technical innovations. For further details see  here.