Computer Science Seminar - University of Houston
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Computer Science Seminar

Toward a Secure, Dependable Mobile Internet

When: Friday, March 4, 2016
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Speaker: Dr. Guan-Hua (Scott) Tu, University of California, Los Angeles

Host: Prof. Stephen Huang

The current 3G/4G mobile network is the only wireless infrastructure that offers wide-area, ubiquitous data and voice services to 3.6 billion users. More and more users use it to access online services through their smartphones. It is a large-scale, global network infrastructure on a par with the wired Internet; it is also called the mobile Internet. However, it is not without limitations and flaws. In this talk, I will present my research on improving the mobile Internet from two aspects: security and reliability.

First, I will present our work on the mobile system security. This area has not been paid enough attentions since it is not projected to have major issues as the Internet from the security standpoint. In this talk, I would like to share my own experience with you to show that it is not the case. I will use a voice service as an example to illustrate that several commonly-held rules are problematic for security. Therefore, an adversary can launch unexpected security attacks, e.g., free data service attack, user account abusing attack on social networks (e.g., Facebook), etc.

Second, I will introduce how to leverage the model-checking techniques to enhance the reliability of the mobile Internet services. It is well known that the design of the control plane of a network largely determines its reliability and performance. However, for the mobile Internet, the correctness verification problem of control-plane protocols remains largely unaddressed due to its complex designs and closed mobile system. We thus developed two software tools to address this problem: CNetVerifier and MobileInsight. We discovered several problematic design issues of mobile Internet standards, the unjustified operational issues of 3G/4G infrastructure and implementation issues of mobile devices. They result in user-perceived performance penalties or even security vulnerabilities.

So far, my research has delivered some preliminary contributions to the modern-day mobile Internet. Three US major carriers have adopted several of our solutions to address the issues we identified; we also cooperated with some cloud service providers, e.g., Facebook, to improve their mobile service security; hundreds of millions of US mobile users have benefited from our research results.

Bio:

Dr. Guan-Hua (Scott) Tu is a postdoctoral scholar in the computer science department at the University of California, Los Angeles where he received his Ph.D. degree. His research interests are in the area of computer networks and network security with current emphasis on the mobile Internet. His research results have been published in several top networking and security conferences, e.g., ACM SIGCOMM, MOBICOM, CCS, etc., and reported by public media. He was a recipient of the UCLA dissertation year fellowship and the IBM Ph.D. fellowship. He received his M.S. from UCLA and his B.S. from National Central University, Taiwan

Website: http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~ghtu