SECURITY ISSUES OF 5G MOBILITY AND O-RAN
Speaker: Alessandro Brighente is assistant professor at the University of Padova.
Affiliation: University of Padova.
Summary: Cellular networks have gone a long road in the development of solutions able to address previous-generation security and privacy issues. Compared to the previous generations, 5G is the first to carefully consider a large variety of threat vectors and attack surfaces, proposing a solution able to handle different types of attacks. However, as technology evolves, so do attackers’ strategies and capabilities, exposing hence novel security threats against last-generation networks. With the development of 6G, novel technologies and methodologies commit exclusively to achieving security and privacy.
In this talk, I will present the 5G security and privacy issues related to mobility and its new architectures. In particular, I will first explore the implications of fake base station attacks in the handover management in 5G and propose a solution. I will then show a vulnerability in the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) leading to a link fabrication attack.
Biography: Alessandro Brighente is assistant professor at the University of Padova. He received his Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering from the University of Padova in Feb. 2021. He was visiting researcher at Nokia Bell Labs, Stuttgart and University of Washington, Seattle in 2019 and 2022, respectively. He has been involved in European and industrial projects with the University of Padova. He served as TPC for several conferences, including Globecom, WWW, ESORICS, and VTC. He was guest editor for IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics and Computers and Security. He is program chair of DevSecOpsRO ( in conjunction with EuroS&P2023). His current research interests include security and privacy in cyber-physical systems, wireless networks, blockchain, and internet of things.
Registration: This talk is open only to students of the Master's degree in Cybersecurity.