Summer on the French Riviera

This past summer I had an internship of 6 months with SAP Labs France on the French Riviera (more specifically in Mougins, a city north of Cannes).

This was as part of a special internship program from my institute, where students are sent abroad for 6 months and can select from a long list of locations, I primarily chose this one because it was the only location which had topics on security. The physical location was a nice perk, and I wanted to go abroad again, even after my last venture left me with mixed feelings.

I had hoped that I would learn what Software Development would look like in a corporate environment, but my team was more research-oriented, so I created Proofs-of-Concepts for my projects, not working in a very structured way following some kind of process. While generally I prefer this kind of work, for this internship I wanted to actually learn this other environment, since I may face it sooner or later when working.

I can not be too specific, since the project is internal, but generally I worked on security of Large Language Models. Large Language Models are being introduced everywhere (for better or worse), and may be vulnerable to attacks, especially my focus was on Jailbreaking (making the model do something it was not supposed to do, e.g. write a manual on how to build a bomb) and Prompt Injection (for example giving the model a second prompt in the data part, see this post). I built a tool to automatically test LLMs for these security vulnerabilities using different open source attack libraries. I also built a tool that could be used to defend LLMs from those attacks, using a number of defenses from literature.

Generally the work was very relaxed, including French two-hour lunch breaks (with the great food from the canteen, voted the best in SAP), and I had a lot of freedom in how to approach tasks, though I also sometimes did not have enough tasks to do.

I met a lot of nice people (other internationals and French people!) and we explored the region together, went on hikes, enjoyed the sea or good food. In that regard, it was a very nice experience.

Another thing I did not like was the bad public transport in the region. I drove there by car (an adventure in its own right) and had to use it to go to work and most other places. There were buses, which I often used because I was tired of all the stressful driving there (way more stressful than in Germany in my opinion), but these stopped running in the evening, and were often stuck in traffic. This was the worst part of my experience.

Learning a foreign language was again a goal of mine, and again I chose a place where I would speak English all the time. But this time I made more of an effort, and noticeably improved my French during the stay. Now I only need to keep it up!

All in all, I can describe it as a vacation, where I had to go to an office 5 days a week 😉.