Level 3 · Ph.D
Ph.D Advanced Offensive Security & Adversary Research
Security · Live · v0
Doctoral adversary research, CTF-style and detection-first — exploitation science and countermeasure design.
- Path type
- Security
- Requirements
- MSc Advanced Offensive Security & Adversary Research
- Enrollment
-
€39.90
- Deadline
- Next cohort starts 2027-09-06 (AY 2027/28)
- Length
- +1 year · 56 phases
- Language
- English · Español
- Content freshness
- Curriculum updated 2026-08-24 · content rev 8d5ac490
- Cortex Credits (CC)
-
280 CC
· 421 CC across all tiers of this programme
What are Cortex Credits? - Syllabus
-
View the phase syllabus
- From operator to adversary researcher
- Adversary emulation & threat-informed defense
- The detection-evasion arms race framed formally
- Measurement discipline for offense
- Telemetry from the attacker's side
- Reproducible offensive research
- Reading the offensive-security literature
- Scan-detection modeling & evasive scanning
- Firewall & IDS evasion research
- Traffic-analysis resistance
- Protocol-level enumeration at depth
- Living-off-the-land reconnaissance
- Recon-research capstone
- Web & service exploitation at research depth
- Fuzzing & symbolic execution for discovery
- Credential-attack research
- Automated exploitation frameworks dissected
- Payload & delivery research
- Access-research capstone
- Machine-code & instruction-level analysis
- Privilege rings in practice: ring 3 ↔ ring 0
- CPU modes & mode-transition abuse
- Extended CPU flags & mitigation bypass
- Ring -1: hypervisor & virtualization internals from the attacker's seat
- Virtualization bypass / VM-escape concepts
- Anti-VM, hypervisor-detection & sandbox evasion
- Low-level capstone — ring -2 & the trust boundary
- Userland rootkit research
- Kernel-level hiding & eBPF for offense
- Persistence design space
- Anti-forensics research
- Capture & credential-harvesting internals
- Covert channels & exfil research
- Post-ex research capstone
- Detection engineering from the adversary's seat
- NSM evasion research
- Host-telemetry evasion
- Timing & operational-security modeling
- Adversarial ML for detection evasion
- The evasion–detection frontier
- Co-evolution capstone
- Threat-actor emulation methodology
- Full-chain campaign automation
- C2 framework research
- Purple-team exercise design
- Detection-gap discovery
- Breach-and-attack-simulation concepts
- Verification & adversarial rigor
- Emulation-research capstone
- Research method
- Tooling-provenance & citation hygiene
- Cross-checking against the defender
- Capstone I — the original contribution
- Capstone II — the verified publication
- Frontier & what's next
- Post-doctoral on-ramp & close
- Enrolment prerequisites
-
- A verified account and admissions-committee approval.
- Completion of MSc Advanced Offensive Security & Adversary Research.
What changed
Every release of this programme, newest first.
- v0 Pilot Wave A backfill: v0 pilot baseline
Professor: Vacancy available
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