Internships

Case Study

Gain Practical Experience

Get a head start on your exciting cyber security career by helping to develop software and IT solutions to challenging real-world problems.

Work Alongside Experts

Work closely with a mentor and a highly skilled team of scientists and engineers focused on the application of cutting-edge software technologies.

Make a Difference

Apply your knowledge and expertise to help digital forensic investigators detect, prevent, and respond to the most advanced and sophisticated threats.

Build Your Resume

An internship at Volexity is an excellent way to build your resume and apply your knowledge and expertise to some of the most challenging problems in cyber security. Our internship program offers flexible opportunities to work on projects, in person or remotely, focused on commercial and Open Source software development, cloud computing, testing, web development, and the application of cutting-edge software technologies. There is strong emphasis placed on problem solving and developing high-quality software. An internship project can include the following areas: 

  • Systems software development
  • Web application development
  • Reverse engineering and system internals
  • Information technology management
  • Designing and implementing new techniques for cyber security

The goal is to work hard on solutions to real-world problems and to help you gain career experience. Volexity interns have gone on to do great things: work at major defense industry contractors, get master’s degrees at Ivy League schools, and join Volexity full time!

Recent Internship Highlights

Contact us if you would like to be notified of future internship opportunities.

Recent Projects

Volatility 3 Decompression Module

Peter, rising graduate student, B.S., Computer Engineering

One of the greatest challenges facing digital forensics investigators is maintaining tool compatibility against a wide variety of platforms that change constantly. New versions of operating systems and applications are released each week, and major versions are often released annually, if not more frequently. When an important investigative capability is lost because of an upgrade, particularly an Open Source capability, it is up to the community to respond and add the missing support.

After a major upgrade of the Windows operating system, some memory forensics capabilities were lost due to the introduction of a new compression algorithm. Volexity intern Peter quickly located vendor documentation for the algorithm, implemented it in multiple languages, and wrote a test suite for validating his implementation against Microsoft's native library. He then integrated his library into Volatility 3 and used the framework to demonstrate the recovery of digital forensics data that was not possible before he wrote his library. Like Volatility 3, Peter's implementation will be Open Source and released as part of the framework.

Adding Features to Commercial Products

Melka, rising Senior, B.S., Computer Science

Volexity's digital forensics products are used in critical investigations every day. As investigators use those products and learn more about their target environments, they often encounter new workflows and capabilities that they would find useful. Volexity interns have the opportunity to work alongside Volexity engineers to enhance and shape the direction of our commercial products and gain valuable product development experience.

Melka joined Volexity excited to learn more about low-level Windows programming and real-world forensics investigations. After discussing the highest priority feature requests with his team, he quickly got up to speed on a corner case of Windows file systems that was important to both our customers and our internal services team. He tried several approaches and implemented a standalone solution. He then went through the full code review and acceptance testing process to get his feature added, shipped, and used by Volexity customers during his internship.

Frontend web app in React

Selina, rising Junior, B.S., Computer Science
Calvin, rising Senior, B.S., Computer Science

Many forensics and security applications are implemented using modern web technologies, such as React. These applications are complex and require a complete understanding of user requirements, close coordination with backend development teams, and careful attention to testing.

During their internship, Calvin and Selina worked closely with a full-time engineering lead to learn the ins and outs of frontend development in React. After completing a comprehensive React tutorial, they built a production web UI by applying iterative development practices based on wireframes and feedback from users. They explored the vast world of JavaScript libraries and selected technologies that were the best fit for their application. Working closely with backend developers, they leveraged GraphQL APIs to retrieve and filter data for their UI. By the end of their internship, Selina and Calvin had produced a working user interface with multiple views and a regression testing framework to validate their results.

Production GraphQL web service in Go

AJ, rising Senior, B.S., Computer Science
Frank, rising Senior, B.S., Computer Science

At the heart of most web applications lies a set of services that offer flexible access to critical data via HTTP-based APIs. These services act as a gateway to powerful data storage and retrieval systems, including SQL databases and document stores. The design and implementation of these services often determine both the scalability and usefulness of the web application.

Frank and AJ collaborated to build a new backend to replace an existing production web service. After learning about the application’s requirements, they studied the SQL-based data architecture and the relative benefits of REST and GraphQL API technologies. They designed multiple GraphQL schemas, implemented resolvers that supported queries and mutations for the application, worked closely with the front-end team to refine their design, and wrote tests to validate their implementation. By the end of the summer, they had completed multiple iterations of the project, working through the full software development lifecycle.

Backend processing in Python

Bridget, rising Junior, B.S., Electrical and Computer Engineering

Security and forensics workflows require access to and management of a wide variety of rich data sources, including system logs, binary artifacts, and structured analysis results. These data need to be ingested, indexed, stored, and retrieved as efficiently and as scalable as possible.

Bridget joined Volexity with a keen interest in low-level platform details. She learned about Volexity’s unique approach to managing Linux forensics data and took the time to investigate the inner workings of the Linux kernel, platform distribution management tools, and build systems. Bridget developed a new Python processing framework for extracting and ingesting data into a GraphQL web service. She explored various software and communications architectures for parallelizing the processing framework, and she learned about real-world constraints such as I/O and networking limits. Working independently, with guidance from experienced engineers, Bridget developed a new framework that outperforms the previous generation of processing and will serve as the foundation of Volexity’s backend long after her internship.