Internship NOKIA Bell Labs Autonomous Patch Management in the UNEXT Era

Our Business Group is a leader in wireless mobility networks and associated services. With more than 3.500 patent families essential for 5G we have a strong 5G portfolio and are a front runner in open and virtualized radio access networks (O-RAN and vRAN). In an age of mounting cyber risk, threat actors often exploit trust—be they insiders, or targeted phishing attacks that bypass human defences. As vulnerabilities are published and weaponized faster than ever, manual patch coordination across stakeholders becomes a serious bottleneck: slow negotiation, varied responsibilities, and long test cycles leave exploitable windows. Traditional patching tools often assume trusted insiders or secure hardware anchors—assumptions that adversaries can defeat in shared-cloud or zero-trust contexts. Bell Labs’ UNEXT initiative is forging a new frontier of fully autonomous, self-governing networks, where every network element is a self-contained, cooperative agent. Within this vision, we extend our blockchain / state-machine-replication framework for patch and audit workflows: every patch decision, audit record, and state change is enforced by consensus among distributed, verifiable nodes—resilient to insider manipulation, accelerating adaptation, and embedding zero-trust discipline into system architecture. We are seeking an intern to push this architecture toward true byzantine resiliency in the UNEXT environment. You will work on enabling autonomous agents to propose, vet, and apply patches without human intervention, integrating AI-based detection and orchestration into consensus-based control.