Nearly 170 interns recently left MIT Lincoln Laboratory to resume their studies, and more than two dozen stayed on as student technical assistants for the 2026‑27 academic year, continuing work on national‑security research. The lab treats the internship as a key pipeline for defense‑critical talent, embedding interns in R&D teams across missile defense, cyber operations, advanced communications, and quantum technologies. In 2026 the program was named to Yello and WayUp’s Top 100 Internship list and earned a Public Service Award for its public‑good impact.\ \ Anna Raymaker’s project focuses on maritime infrastructure security. As a Georgia Tech PhD student she built a boat test‑bed and soon realized a gap in shipping security research. Conversations with mariners highlighted the Automatic Identification System (AIS) – a device that broadcasts a vessel’s location, speed, and course – as a weak point. AIS lacks identity verification, enabling “ghost fleets” to masquerade as other ship types to evade sanctions. At Lincoln Laboratory Anna examined AIS’s trust assumptions and identified several interference methods, including radio‑based spoofing. Spoofed messages can command ships to change transmission channels or report false positions, potentially altering their course. Working with advisor Hamed Okhravi, she explored defenses against such false signals, built a new experimental test‑bed from scratch, ran detailed experiments, analyzed results, and helped turn the work into a publication. She now plans to study undersea cable sabotage, hypothesizing that AIS trajectory data could predict malicious ship behavior.\ \ Vivek Jagadeesh, a master’s student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, joined the Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group to work on Hardware‑Assisted Kernel Compartmentalization (HAKC). HAKC mitigates the risk of kernel bugs by splitting kernel code into smaller components separated by access‑control checks. Vivek’s focus is industrial adoption: making HAKC less proprietary so major Linux distributors such as Red Hat or Canonical can integrate it. To give these distributors visibility into HAKC’s modifications, he built a source‑to‑source compiler (transpiler) that injects HAKC code directly into the original C source while preserving the file’s metadata and clearly marking the additions. This enables developers to audit changes and allows HAKC to fit into the complex build systems used by kernel developers. The transpiler can transform the entire Linux kernel, a milestone toward industry deployment, and will underpin the next HAKC release under the Open Resilient Compartmentalization Alliance, a Linux Foundation initiative. Vivek received strong mentorship throughout the internship and looks forward to further system‑security work in the fall.\ \ The lab’s internship offers students real‑world projects with tangible impact, helping them apply their research in future studies and careers.\ \ Review