Unpatched Design Vulnerabilities in Cellular Standards – with Yongdae Kim

The Helsinki-Aalto Institute for Cybersecurity (HAIC) public outreach initiative aims to make cybersecurity more accessible to a broader audience. Part of this initiative, are organizing HAIC Talks, a series of public lectures on contemporary topics in cybersecurity. In the style of studia generalia, these lectures are free and open to everyone. No background knowledge in cybersecurity is required.

Speaker: Prof. Yongdae Kim, Department of Electrical Engineering and the Graduate School of Information Security and a head of Police Science and Technology Research Center at KAIST, Korea.

Lecture description: In a couple of years, "study items" for the 6G security standard will be set. Security issues not included in these study items are unlikely to be standardized and patched even in 6G. Therefore, before these study items are set, the security research community needs to put in effort to find security vulnerabilities in cellular standards up to 5G. Furthermore, as a community, we need to find solutions to these vulnerabilities that are practical enough to be accepted by the standard bodies. In this talk, I will introduce unpatched design vulnerabilities and attacks in cellular standards up to 5G. I will also talk about potential defense mechanisms and reasons why they have not been accepted in 3GPP so far.

About the speaker: Yongdae Kim is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Graduate School of Information Security and a head of Police Science and Technology Research Center at KAIST. He received a PhD degree from the computer science department at the University of Southern California in 2002. Before joining KAIST in 2012, he was a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities for 10 years. He served as a KAIST Chair Professor between 2013 and 2016 and a director of Cyber Security Research Center between 2018 and 2020. He is currently serving as a steering committee member of ACM WISEC and served as a general chair for ACM CCS 2021, a program committee chair for ACM WISEC 2022, an associate editor for ACM TOPS, and a steering committee member of NDSS. His main research interest is finding and fixing novel vulnerabilities for emerging technologies such as drones, self-driving cars, and cellular networks.

Time: 12.12.2022 at 16:00 – 17:30 (coffee and buns served from 15:30). The lecture will be approximately 60 minutes, after which there will be time for questions.

Venue: Lumituuli, Dipoli, Aalto University (Otakaari 24, Espoo)

This event is supported by the Aalto University School of Science.