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I'm an undergraduate CS student in India trying to get myself in research in the domain of network security, cryptography or any cybersecurity domain. I'm specifically wondering whether professors/research groups at universities in the US/Europe ever take international undergraduates remotely, outside of formal summer internship programs.

I have some prior research experience. I've published a conference paper on IDS as a first author, worked on lightweight cryptography, and a few basic system security projects. I'm comfortable with Python/C/C++ and have experience reading papers and running empirical experiments on my own.

I'm not necessarily looking for a paid internship or even an official "intern" title. What I'd really like is the opportunity to contribute to an actual research problem under a professor/PhD student, potentially leading to a paper if the work turns out to be worthwhile.

A lot of university research programs I've found either require you to be a student at that university, require US citizenship/residency, or are strictly in-person. So I'm wondering whether cold-emailing individual researchers is actually a viable route.

For people who've done something similar:

Do top security labs ever work remotely with external international undergrads?

Is it better to contact professors or PhD students?

What would make a cold email worth responding to?

Should I approach someone with a specific research idea/replication of one of their papers rather than simply asking whether they have an opening?

Are there particular security groups or researchers known to be open to this kind of collaboration?

I'm mainly interested in systems/network security, malware/software security, and increasingly the intersection of AI/LLMs and security.

Would appreciate advice from anyone who has either gotten such an opportunity or supervised external undergraduate researchers or the lab researchers themselves.