Abstract: As the world prepares for the advent of 6G security standards, it is crucial to address unpatched design vulnerabilities in the current 5G standard. This talk will delve into the vulnerabilities and attacks present in cellular standards up to 5G, highlighting the potential security risks and ways to exploit them. The limitations of existing proposals to secure these vulnerabilities will also be examined, emphasizing the need for practical solutions to secure cellular standards before the 6G study items are established.

Furthermore, the talk will address the challenges associated with unpatched vulnerabilities in 5G, which are likely to persist for the next 20 years. Given that private 5G networks are already being utilized for several mission-critical applications, it is imperative to consider how to address these zero-day attacks. The talk will conclude by discussing potential approaches to mitigate the security risks posed by unpatched design vulnerabilities in 5G, including the need for continued research, monitoring, and response planning.

Biography: Prof. 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 Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He received his 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. Prof. Kim 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.