Summary: The mobile network (e.g., 4G LTE and 5G NR), the only large-scale wireless network infrastructure on par with the Internet, plays a critical role in interconnecting various mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, massive/critical IoT devices) and providing them with ubiquitous network services. In recent years, more users are accessing the Internet through mobile networks; since the first quarter of 2021, mobile devices (excluding tablets) have generated more than 54% of global website traffic. However, the security of the nowadays mobile networked systems is still far from being satisfactory. Unprecedented malicious attacks against mobile devices and the mobile network infrastructure cannot be effectively defended by the current complicated and error-prone design and pose real threats to a large number of users. In this talk, I would like to share with you my research experience in identifying various security vulnerabilities in essential mobile network services using formal and/or empirical approaches and securing billions of mobile users and the infrastructure. About the speaker: Dr. Guan-Hua Tu is an assistant professor in the department of computer science and engineering at Michigan State University. He is the director of the Security, Networking, and Mobile Systems Research (SNMS) laboratory. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to that, he worked at MediaTek as a wireless communication software engineer, project manager, and researcher (invented eight U.S. patents). His research interests are in the broad areas of security, IoT, mobile systems, and wireless networking, with a recent focus on innovating 5G/4G mobile network architecture/protocol/technologies, cellular/Wi-Fi IoT, secure cloud computing/services, blockchain technologies. He and his research group have identified a large number of security vulnerabilities in operational 4G/5G mobile ecosystems. The research results have been published in the most prestigious networking and security conferences and journals, e.g., ACM CCS, MobiCom, MobiSys, ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, etc. The solutions they proposed have been adopted by tier-one industrial partners, e.g., AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Facebook. He was a recipient of the Facebook security award, Google security rewards, best paper award at IEEE CNS'18, UCLA dissertation year fellowship award, and the IBM Ph.D. fellowship award.https://www.cse.msu.edu/~ghtu
