Internship or Master’s Thesis (m/f/d) Certificate Management in OT

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This position reports to:

R&D Team Lead - Secure Connected Systems

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Security breaches, such as the December 2025 attack on the Polish power grid, underscore the critical importance of robust security measures in operational technology (OT) environments. Especially inadequate and misconfigured access controls make systems vulnerable to intrusion. Certificate-based authentication provides strong security quarantees, however deploying certificates in a simple and user-friendly manner remains difficult in OT settings.

Unlike IT systems where certificate management is largely solved, OT settings face unique obstacles.Networks sometimes are disconnected from the internet and strictly isolated. Devices in the network are of diverse nature and have vastly different capabilities with regards to computation and communication. But first and foremost, availability and reliability are the main priority in an OT environment to ensure safety and safeguard the environment and human life. Security mechanisms must ensure that operation always runs smoothly, even in emergencies.

During your internship or work on your master's thesis, you will support industrial research projects by working to improve the process of certificate distribution for providers of OT infrastructure and evaluating the practical feasibility of existing standards.

Key responsibilities

The work model for the role is: #LI-Hybrid

You will be mainly accountable for:

• Improving certificate management: Designing and prototyping more user-friendly and reliable ways to distribute certificates in OT environments, drawing inspiration from solutions like Let's Encrypt while adapting them to the unique constraints of industrial networks.

• Evaluating existing standards: Assessing the practical feasibility of current certificate management standards and identifying gaps or limitations when applied to real-world OT installations with strict availability and reliability requirements.

• Addressing OT-specific constraints: Investigating and accounting for the distinct challenges of OT environments, including air-gapped networks, highly diverse device capabilities, and the overriding priority of operational continuity and safety.

Qualifications for the role

• We expect you to bring creativity, initiative, and result orientation to support driving our innovations toward new products and services.

• You have a study background in computer science, electrical engineering, information security, or similar knowledge from software engineering and development experience.

• You bring a very good understanding of web security, including HTTPS/SSL, authentication mechanisms, and Public Key Infrastructures (PKI), as well as solid knowledge of standard symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic algorithms used in modern web communication.

• Strong programming experience in at least one language is required, with memory-efficient languages such as C or C++ being a significant plus.

• A good understanding of the OT domain, including its deployment, operation, and constraints, is an advantage.

• You are highly motivated, team-minded, and able to work independently.

• Fluent English in verbal and written form is required.

Interested in joining our team? We are looking forward to receiving your complete application (CV and Transcript of records) through our online tool. In the case of equal suitability, people with severe disabilities and their equals are given preference.

ABB AG

+49 (0) 621 381 3500

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