As the world moves to 5G cellular networks and next-generation is being envisioned, security is of paramount importance and new tools are needed to ensure it. In the talk, after discussing motivating trends in wireless communications, we present LTEInspector, a model-based testing approach for cellular network protocols.
LTEInspector combines a symbolic model checker and a cryptographic protocol verifier in the symbolic attacker model. Using it, we uncovered 10 new attacks along with 9 prior attacks, categorized into three abstract classes (i.e., security, user privacy, and disruption of service), in three procedures of 4G LTE.
To ensure that the exposed attacks pose real threats and are indeed realizable in practice, 8 of the 10 new attacks have been validated and their accompanying adversarial assumptions have been tested in a real testbed. We then present results obtained by 5GReasoner, which extends the LTEInspector to 5G protocols. We then overview on-going research projects.
Elisa Bertino is Samuel Conte Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. She serves as Director of the Purdue Cyberspace Security Lab (Cyber2Slab). Prior to joining Purdue, she was a professor and department head at the Department of Computer Science and Communication of the University of Milan. She has been a visiting researcher at the IBM Research Laboratory in San Jose (now Almaden), at Rutgers University, at Telcordia Technologies. She has also held visiting professor positions at the Singapore National University and the Singapore Management University.
Her recent research focuses on security and privacy of cellular networks and IoT systems, and on edge analytics for cybersecurity. Elisa Bertino is a fellow member of IEEE, ACM, and AAAS. She received the 2002 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award for “outstanding contributions to database systems and database security and advanced data management systems,” the 2005 IEEE Computer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award for “pioneering and innovative research contributions to secure distributed systems”, the 2019-2020 ACM Athena Lecturer Award, and the 2021 IEEE 2021 Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award. She is currently serving as ACM Vice-President.