Internship Opens Career Opportunities

The skills learned and the contacts made during an internship at Intel will help accelerate Brian Tauro’s career and help him meet his career goals after he earns a Ph.D. in computer science from Illinois Institute of Technology.

“This internship definitely has opened up opportunities in security research, both due to the type of work and also networking with various security research professionals,” he says. “My career goals include making a contribution in operating system research by publishing many papers in top conferences, and a long-term goal is to come up with a useful software tool, like LaTeX, which can benefit people.”

While at Intel Tauro worked on a team that investigated the efficacy of hardware-based telemetry to detect supply chain attacks as well as new viruses and malware. This was accomplished by developing synthetic exploits and by using various penetration systems such as Metasploit and Cobalt to mimic modern-day exploits.

Tauro says his role on the team included constructing and reproducing modern-day exploits using various penetration systems, as well as measuring the accuracy of Intel’s anomaly detection model to detect modern-day exploits.

He accomplished this by documenting the exploits, networking with other security researchers, investigating exploit detection research opportunities in hardware-based telemetry, and discussing the performance of the model with other team members.

“What surprised me most, was that having fundamental knowledge in core courses at Illinois Tech made my internship duties easier,” Tauro says. “Courses such as Operating Systems, Virtual Machines, System and Network Security  helped me develop exploits. I had the opportunity to work on  several research projects with my adviser Kyle Hale. One of them was to build a system call interception tool, ‘mktrace,’ for a research paper, which eventually helped me to construct system call hijacking exploits during my internship.”