utrecht university phd ielts

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Utrecht University

Netherlands

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Founded in 1636 and located in the heart of the Netherlands, Utrecht University is one of Europe's leading research universities, recognised internationally for its high-quality, innovative approach to both research and teaching.

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All scores are indicative. Please contact the Institution directly for an accurate requirement

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Gender Studies

Doing a Phd

If you have completed your Master's programme, and you are enthusiastic about doing research in your field, then maybe doing a Doctorate (PhD) might be something for you. A Doctor’s degree is the highest academic degree awarded by a Dutch university. You start as 'assistant in training' (aio) or 'researcher in training' (oio).

At Utrecht University

At Utrecht University you take part in education in one of the Graduate Schools and often also teach students. During the four-year PhD programme you work under the guidance of a professor on creating a research project that results in a dissertation or a series of articles in scientific journals. You can search for positions on research projects on offer or a position whereby you are free to submit your own research proposal. Read more on doing a PhD at Utrecht University. 

Other options

The best way to find a PhD position is through networking with the professor in the field you wish to specialize. Another option is to search via www.academictransfer.nl . Here you can also find more information on doing PhD research in the Netherlands. 

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Utrecht University

Founded in 1636 and located in the heart of the Netherlands, Utrecht University is one of Europe's leading research universities, recognised internationally for its high-quality, innovative approach to both research and teaching.

Website: http://www.uu.nl

IELTS accepted. Contact organisation for score.

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PhD Programmes

Obtaining a phd position.

As a PhD candidate in the Netherlands, you are not a student but a university employee in most cases. Utrecht University offers several options for PhD candidates.

The primary criterion for admission to a PhD track is the applicant's quality. To be admitted to a PhD programme, applicants must meet stringent academic requirements. You need to have a solid background in the theory and methods of your field, hold a recognised Master’s degree (or equivalent) and demonstrate a good knowledge of English. For more information on admissions, read the Doctoral Degree Regulations Utrecht University  (pdf).

Employment or other funding

There are different options for obtaining a PhD at Utrecht. As a PhD candidate in the Netherlands, you are not a student but a university employee in most cases. Please bear in mind that Utrecht University offers very limited PhD opportunities for people who are not employed at a PhD position. Most PhD candidates will be employed by Utrecht University. If we cannot employ you, you may want to look for funding in your country of residence for private scholarships.

There are different options for obtaining a PhD at Utrecht:

• Obtaining a PhD as an employee
• Obtaining a PhD without being employed by Utrecht University

Utrecht University Heidelberglaan 8 3584 CS Utrecht The Netherlands Tel. +31 (0)30 253 35 50

How to become a PhD candidate

To become a PhD candidate you can apply to a specific PhD position that can be found on our vacancy website . If you can't find vacancies fitting your research interest, please consider sending an open application to the secretary of the research department of your interest .

Admission requirements

To apply for a PhD position you must:

• Be familiar with the theory and methodology of the research field
• Have a Dutch master’s degree (or a foreign equivalent)
• Be proficient in English

Please read the job description carefully for any additional requirements. 

English language requirement

Doing a PhD at TU Delft requires English proficiency at a certain level to ensure that you are able to:

• Communicate and interact well
• Participate in English-taught Doctoral Education courses
• Write scientific articles and your dissertation
• Successfully defend your PhD dissertation

Here's the minimum requirement if you want to apply for a PhD or EngD programme at TU Delft:

• IELTS Overall band score is 7.0 (with scores of at least 6.5 for all sections)
• TOEFL Overall band score is 100 (with scores of at least 21 for all sections) Note: The TOEFL iBT Home Edition is accepted for the English proficiency, the TOEFL MyBest scores is not accepted.

You do not need to present the test results as part of your application; these results will be requested at a later stage during the selection procedure.

Accommodations for test takers with disabilities or health-related needs

The testing institutions IELTS and TOEFL have accommodations available for test takers with a specific learning difficulty – for instance dyslexia or a motor disability – or health related needs. If you, for example, need an extension of the test time, you can discuss this personally with the testing institution. For more information please visit the  IELTS website  and the  TOEFL IBT Test website .

Exemptions from English proficiency test

Native speakers will be exempt from the English test requirement, as well as, in principle, non-native applicants who have obtained an English-taught Master’s degree. If during the selection process it is deemed that the English proficiency of the candidate with an English-taught Master’s degree does not meet the requirements, they may also be asked to do a test. 

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• Doctoral regulations & Implementation Decree

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Career Perspectives

Aart Bik's Homepage

Aart J.C. Bik (a.k.a. Arjan Bik) was born in Gouda, The Netherlands. He received his high school diploma (Gymnasium Beta) in 1987, in Gouda. In 1988, he finished his propaedeutical exam in computer science (cum laude) and he received the MSc degree in computer science (cum laude) from the Utrecht University in 1992. He received his PhD degree from the Leiden University in 1996. During his PhD research under supervision of prof. dr. H.A.G. Wijshoff, Aart designed and implemented the sparse compiler MT1 . His PhD thesis received the C.J. Kok Award (outstanding thesis award).

In 1996 and 1997, Aart was a post-doctoral researcher at the Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, where he researched high-performance Java under supervision of prof. dr. D.B. Gannon. This research resulted in the implementation of JAVAR (a prototype Java restructuring compiler) and JAVAB (a prototype bytecode parallelization tool).

In May 2007, Aart moved to Google Inc. in Mountain View, California, where he has worked on Pregel, a distributed system for large-scale graph computations. Aart co-authored the paper "Pregel: A System for Large-Scale Graph Processing", which won the 2020 ACM SIGMOD Test of Time Award . Aart also worked in Google[x] on the GDK (Glass Development Kit) , on the optimizing compiler for ART (Android Runtime), where he received the 2017 Google Silver Perfy Award for his work on SIMDization in the ART compiler , and on the Dart VM and compiler. In November 2019, Aart joined the MLIR compiler team, where he revamped his old passion for vectorization and compiler support for sparse computations, while working on a new passion for machine learning! More information can be found on the MLIR Sparsifier website

Philipp Jovanovic

Hi! I am Philipp. You might also know me as Daeinar . I do research on applied cryptography, security in decentralized and distributed systems, and privacy. I strive to turn research ideas into useful software tools.

At the moment, I work as a postdoctoral researcher in the Decentralized and Distributed Systems Lab at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. In 2018, I co-founded Sockpuppet Technologies, Inc. , a company for cryptography consulting and trainings .

I am a member of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3) and the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), and a scientific advisor to the DFINITY project.

I completed my PhD in cryptology in 2015 at the Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics of the University of Passau, Germany. My PhD thesis received the 2016 dissertation award of the University of Passau in the areas of mathematics and computer science. For more details about myself, please refer to my curriculum vitae .

• Nov 2018: I will present our research on blockchain sharding at Stanford on November 28. Ping me if you’re around and want to chat!
• Oct 2018: I was invited to present our blockchain research on layer 1 scaling at the Master Workshop by Binary District and researchinstitute.io in Amsterdam on November 17-18. See you there!
• Aug 2018: Jean-Philippe Aumasson and I are running another training session on Crypto Defenses and Attacks in Redwood City, California, on November 26-27. Join us!
• May 2018: Our paper On Enforcing Digital Immunity of a Large Humanitarian Organization won a distinguished paper award at the IEEE Security and Privacy Symposium, 2018.
• Mar 2018: We are organizing another EPFL Summer Research Institute on Security and Privacy on June 18-19 and have again an awesome set of speakers. Attendance is free of charge, so don’t miss it!
• Jan 2018: Our paper On Enforcing Digital Immunity of a Large Humanitarian Organization has been accepted to the IEEE Security and Privacy Symposium, 2018.
• Nov 2017: Our paper OmniLedger: A Secure, Scale-Out Decentralized Ledger via Sharding has been accepted to the IEEE Security and Privacy Symposium, 2018.
• Calypso: Auditable Sharing of Private Data over Blockchains , Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Enis Ceyhun Alp, Sandra Deepthy Siby, Nicolas Gailly, Linus Gasser, Philipp Jovanovic, Ewa Syta, Bryan Ford , Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2018/209, 2018.
• Beyond Conventional Security in Sponge-Based Authenticated Encryption Modes , Philipp Jovanovic, Atul Luykx, Bart Mennink, Yu Sasaki, Kan Yasuda , Journal of Cryptology, 2018.
• On Enforcing the Digital Immunity of a Large Humanitarian Organisation , Stevens Le Blond, Alejandro Cuevas, Juan Ramón Troncoso-Pastoriza, Philipp Jovanovic, Bryan Ford, Jean-Pierre Hubaux , IEEE Security and Privacy, 2018.
• OmniLedger: A Secure, Scale-Out, Decentralized Ledger via Sharding , Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Philipp Jovanovic, Linus Gasser, Nicolas Gailly, Ewa Syta, Bryan Ford , IEEE Security and Privacy, 2018.
• Chainiac: Proactive Software-Update Transparency via Collectively Signed Skipchains and Verified Builds , Kirill Nikitin, Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Philipp Jovanovic, Nicolas Gailly, Linus Gasser, Ismail Khoffi, Justin Cappos, Bryan Ford , USENIX Security Symposium, 2017.
• Scalable Bias-Resistant Distributed Randomness , Ewa Syta, Philipp Jovanovic, Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Nicolas Gailly, Linus Gasser, Ismail Khoffi, Michael J. Fischer, Bryan Ford , IEEE Security and Privacy, 2017.
• Proof-of-Personhood: Redemocratizing Permissionless Cryptocurrencies , Maria Borge, Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Philipp Jovanovic, Nicolas Gailly, Linus Gasser, Bryan Ford , IEEE Security and Privacy on the Blockchain, 2017.
• Nonce-Disrespecting Adversaries: Practical Forgery Attacks on GCM in TLS , Hanno Böck, Aaron Zauner, Sean Devlin, Juraj Somorovsky, Philipp Jovanovic , USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT), 2016.
• Enhancing Bitcoin Security and Performance with Strong Consistency via Collective Signing , Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Philipp Jovanovic, Nicolas Gailly, Ismail Khoffi, Linus Gasser, Bryan Ford , USENIX Security Symposium, 2016.
• Managing Identities Using Blockchains and CoSi , Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Linus Gasser, Ismail Khoffi, Philipp Jovanovic, Nicolas Gailly, Bryan Ford , Hot Topics in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (HotPETs), 2016.
• Keeping Authorities 'Honest or Bust' with Decentralized Witness Cosigning , Ewa Syta, Iulia Tamas, Dylan Visher, David Isaac Wolinsky, Philipp Jovanovic, Linus Gasser, Nicolas Gailly, Ismail Khoffi, Bryan Ford , IEEE Security and Privacy, 2016.
• Improved Masking for Tweakable Blockciphers with Applications to Authenticated Encryption , Robert Granger, Philipp Jovanovic, Bart Mennink, Samuel Neves , Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT, 2016.
• NORX8 and NORX16: Authenticated Encryption for Low-End Systems , Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Philipp Jovanovic, Samuel Neves , Trustworthy Manufacturing and Utilization of Secure Devices (TRUDEVICE), 2015.
• Analyzing Permutations for AES-like Ciphers: Understanding ShiftRows , Christof Beierle, Philipp Jovanovic, Martin M. Lauridsen, Gregor Leander, Christian Rechberger , Topics in Cryptology – CT-RSA, 2015.
• Practical Cryptanalysis of the Open Smart Grid Protocol , Philipp Jovanovic, Samuel Neves , Fast Software Encryption (FSE), 2015.
• Fault-based Attacks on the Bel-T Block Cipher Family , Philipp Jovanovic, Ilia Polian , Design, Automation, and Test in Europe (DATE), 2015.
• Beyond \(2^{c/2}\) Security in Sponge-Based Authenticated Encryption Modes , Philipp Jovanovic, Atul Luykx, Bart Mennink , Advances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT, 2014.
• Parametric Trojans for Fault-Injection Attacks on Cryptographic Hardware , Raghavan Kumar, Philipp Jovanovic, Wayne Burleson, Ilia Polian , IEEE Fault Diagnosis and Tolerance in Cryptography (FDTC), 2014.
• Analysis of NORX: Investigating Differential and Rotational Properties , Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Philipp Jovanovic, Samuel Neves , Progress in Cryptology – Latincrypt, 2014.
• NORX: Parallel and Scalable AEAD , Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Philipp Jovanovic, Samuel Neves , European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS), 2014.
• Precise Fault-Injections using Voltage and Temperature Manipulation for Differential Cryptanalysis , Raghavan Kumar, Philipp Jovanovic, Ilia Polian , IEEE International On-Line Testing Symposium (IOLTS), 2014.
• Multi-Stage Fault Attacks on Block Ciphers , Philipp Jovanovic, Martin Kreuzer, Ilia Polian , 14th Workshop on RTL and High Level Testing (WRTLT), 2013.
• An Algebraic Fault Attack on the LED Block Cipher , Philipp Jovanovic, Martin Kreuzer, Ilia Polian , Third International Conference on Symbolic Computation and Cryptography (SCC), 2012.
• A Fault Attack on the LED Block Cipher , Philipp Jovanovic, Martin Kreuzer, Ilia Polian , International Workshop on Constructive Side-Channel Analysis and Secure Design (COSADE), 2012.
• Algebraic Attacks using SAT-Solvers , Philipp Jovanovic, Martin Kreuzer , Groups – Complexity – Cryptology, 2010.

Talks (selected)

• OmniLedger: A Secure, Scale-Out, Decentralized Ledger , 20 min, IEEE International Verification and Security Workshop (invited talk), Platja D'Aro (Spain), July 4, 2018.
• OmniLedger: A Secure, Scale-Out, Decentralized Ledger , 30 min, Binary District - Blockchain for Payment Processing (invited talk), London (UK), February 15, 2018.
• Scalable Bias-Resistant Distributed Randomness , 18 min, IEEE Security & Privacy, San Jose (USA), May 23, 2017.
• Collective Authorities – Transparency and Decentralized Trust at Scale , 18 min, dotsecurity.io (invited talk), Paris (France), April 21, 2017.
• Improved Masking for Tweakable Blockciphers with Applications to Authenticated Encryption , 45 min, SPEED-B (invited talk), Utrecht (Netherlands), October 20, 2016.
• Improved Masking for Tweakable Blockciphers with Applications to Authenticated Encryption , 25 min, EUROCRYPT 2016, Vienna (Austria), May 9, 2016.
• Analysis and Design of Symmetric Cryptographic Algorithms , 45 min, PhD Defense, Passau (Germany), October 30, 2015.
• Dumb Crypto in Smart Grids , 45 min, Google Tech Talk (invited talk), Zurich (Switzerland), May 11, 2015.
• Practical Cryptanalysis of the Open Smart Grid Protocol , 25 min, FSE 2015, Istanbul (Turkey), March 10, 2015.
• CAESAR & NORX – The Future of Authenticated Encryption? , 45 min, 31C3, Hamburg (Germany), December 29, 2014.
• NORX – A Parallel and Scalable Authenticated Encryption Scheme , 45 min, ASFWS 2014, Yverdon-les-Bains (Switzerland), November 4, 2014.
• NORX – A Parallel and Scalable Authenticated Encryption Scheme , 25 min, ESORICS 2014, Wroclaw (Poland), September 8, 2014.
• Algebraic Fault Attacks on Block Ciphers , 25 min, TRUDEVICE 2013, Freiburg (Germany), December 13, 2013.
• Multi-Stage Fault Attacks , 25 min, SETS 2013, Sauze d'Oulx (Italy), March 27, 2013.
• Attacks on Cryptographic Hardware , 45 min, IEEE Student Branch, Passau (Germany), January 28, 2013.
• ByzCoin: Securely Scaling Blockchains , August 4, 2016, Philipp Jovanovic
• The NORX Bug Bounty Program , February 18, 2016, Philipp Jovanovic
• Changes , October 12, 2015, Philipp Jovanovic
• Digital Reboot , September 24, 2015, Philipp Jovanovic
• The SNAFU Principle , July 18, 2015, Philipp Jovanovic
• Status Quo of NORX , June 15, 2014, Philipp Jovanovic
• Benchmarking Symmetric Crypto on the Apple A7 , April 29, 2014, Philipp Jovanovic