Full Program

Keynotes

Keynote 1: Soft Signals, Hard Problems: Resilience and Security in Wireless Systems

Prof. Dr. Guevara Noubir

Abstract: Wireless communications systems are today ubiquitous and critical to a variety of applications. This raises issues both about security and privacy, but also in terms of co-existence of technologies and sharing spectrum. Limited resources and lack of strong security models, led to a variety of weaknesses in wireless and mobile systems. These risks are amplified by the accelerated pervasiveness and ad hoc integration of wireless communications in a variety of systems, from cyber-physical systems, to IoT and Industrial IoT. At the same time hardware and in particular wireless softwarization is removing natural barriers such as attacks’ physical co-location, or cost. In this talk, we reflect on some of the wireless and mobile security and privacy challenges and trends, from side-channel attacks to cross-layer attacks. I will present a selection of some of the attacks we uncovered in several wireless and mobile systems such as 3GPP 5G, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi, but also in avionics (ILS, ACARS). We will conclude with a brief discussion of defense approaches. In particular, the need and path to systematic modeling of security threats and defenses, as well as security by design approaches considering software-enabled attacks.

Speaker: Guevara Noubir is a Professor at Northeastern University (Boston, MA) within the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and currently serving as the Executive Director of Cybersecurity Programs, and the PI of Northeastern University’s NSA/DHS designated Center of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity Research. He received the US National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2005, Google Faculty Research Award on Privacy in 2016, Northeastern University Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award 2018, best paper awards at ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec) 2011 and 2018, and the IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security best paper in 2016. Dr. Noubir led Northeastern University winning teams in the DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) in 2017, 2018, and finalist in 2019. Dr. Noubir chaired the technical program committee of several security conferences including the ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec), and IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security. His research has been funded by BAE Systems, DARPA, Draper Labs, Microsoft Research, ONR, NSA, NSF, and Raytheon. Dr. Noubir holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and MS in CS (diplôme d’ingénieur) from Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Informatique et de Mathématiques Appliquées de Grenoble (ENSIMAG), France. He held research and visiting positions at CSEM SA, EPFL, Eurecom, and MIT.

Keynote 2: Dependable and Robust Communication for Differentiated Connectivity

Dr. Joachim Sachs

Abstract: With the digitalization of enterprises and society, we see an increasing interest to adopt mobile network connectivity for a wide range of use cases. This includes business-critical, mission-critical and society-critical tasks, which are in need of reliable operation. To be able to such critical applications in a reliable manner, the talk will present dependable differentiated connectivity as an approach to provide application-specific connectivity services. This includes service assurance so that the connectivity service will deliver the minimum level of performance required by critical applications. The talk will provide an outlook for mobile networks towards differentiated connectivity and dependable communication. It will also address network robustness, to be able to provide network resilience in case of faults.

Speaker: Joachim Sachs studied electrical and electronics engineering at RWTH Aachen University, ENSEEIHT Toulouse, NTNU Trondheim, and University of Strathclyde Glasgow. He received a diploma degree from RWTH Aachen University and a Ph.D. degree from Technical University Berlin. He is currently Senior Expert at Ericsson Research and has more than 25 years of experience in mobile telecommunication from 2G to 6G. His research interests include 5G and 6G mobile networks for enterprise use cases and industrial IoT, including cross-industry research collaborations. In 2009, Joachim was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. He was awarded as Ericsson Inventor of the Year in 2006, has received the Research Award of the Vodafone Foundation for Scientific Research in 2010, and was awarded as Ericsson Top Performer in 2019. He is the Co-Chair of the Technical Committee on Communication Networks and Systems of the German VDE Information Technology Society and a VDE ITG Fellow. He also co-chairs the working group Resilient-By-Design of the 6G Platform Germany. He holds numerous patents and has published three books, two book chapters, and around 90 papers in international journals and conferences. He is a regular invited speaker and a co-organizer of workshops, panels, sessions, and journal special issues.