CyLab Seminar: Elisa Bertino

*Please note: this CyLab seminar is open only to partners and Carnegie Mellon University faculty, students, and staff.

Speaker:
Elisa Bertino
Samuel Conte Distinguished Professor of Computer Science
Purdue University

Talk Title:
Applying Machine Learning to Securing Cellular Networks

Abstract:
Cellular network security is more critical than ever, given the increased complexity of these networks and the numbers of applications that depend on them, including telehealth, remote education, ubiquitous robotics and autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and Industry 4.0. In order to devise more effective defenses, a recent trend is to leverage machine learning (ML) techniques, which have become applicable because of today advanced capabilities for collecting data as well high-performance computing systems for training of ML models. Recent large language models (LLMs) are also opening new interesting directions for security applications. In this talk, I will first present a comprehensive threat analysis in the context of 5G cellular networks to give a concrete example of the magnitude of the problem of cellular network security. Then, I will present two specific applications of ML techniques for the security of cellular networks. The first application focuses on the use of natural language processing techniques to the problem of detecting inconsistencies in the "natural language specifications" of cellular network protocols. The second application addresses the design of an anomaly detection system able to detect the presence of malicious base stations and determine the type of attack. Then I'll conclude with a discussion on research directions.

Bio:
Elisa Bertino is a Samuel Conte Distinguished 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 “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 received an Honorary Doctorate from Aalborg University in 2021 and an Honorary Research Doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Salerno in 2023. She is currently serving as ACM Vice-president.