Vision Talks

Cellular Dual-Use Technologies


Cellular protocols include specification-level vulnerabilities that have persisted across 4G and 5G. These standard-compliant features enable surveillance tools such as IMSI-catchers and remain unpatched,often treated as intentional design choices. We refer to these as Cellular Dual-Use Technologies: system-level mechanisms critical both for conducting surveillance and for defending against it. Governments rely on them for lawful interception and protection against foreign intelligence, while civil society actors use countermeasures to avoid tracking in repressive environments.
Because these mechanisms originate from core system design, effective mitigation requires specification changes. Access to real-world systems remains limited, and academic research has been largely disconnected from deployed infrastructure. This talk presents two case studies: a localization technique with front-door-level precision, and an analysis of fake base stations and their detection. We conclude by considering how academic work can engage with these challenges despite structural limitations.

Yongdae Kim
Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, South Korea

Yongdae Kim (IEEE Fellow) is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Graduate School of Information Security at KAIST, where he holds the KAIST ICT Endowed Chair Professorship and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering of Korea. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 2002 and was on the faculty at the University of Minnesota until 2012. He previously served as Chair Professor at KAIST (2013–2016) and Director of the KAIST Cyber Security Research Center (2018–2020). He currently serves as the steering committee chair for NDSS and has chaired major conferences including ACM CCS and ACM WiSec. His research focuses on discovering and analyzing security vulnerabilities in emerging systems such as cellular networks, drones, and autonomous vehicles.

Secure perception for cyber-physical systems


Emerging cyber-physical systems (CPS) rely on precise position/time information and exchange location-specific data in real time. A broad gamut of applications, including intelligent transportation and autonomous/unmanned vehicles (aerial, ground or surface), gains prominence. Enabled by wireless networking and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), they offer valuable services yet they can become prime targets for cyber-attacks. The challenge is two-fold: (i) how to secure position/time information for each CPS platform/device and (ii) how to safeguard the CPS from misbehaving devices. This talk discusses how to address this challenge, in particular (i) the security of GNSS-based services, a cornerstone technology for perceiving space and time, and, more briefly, (ii) the security of driving automaton, vulnerable to attacks on cooperative awareness.

Panos Papadimitratos
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

Panos Papadimitratos earned his Ph.D. degree from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. He then held positions at Virginia Tech, EPFL and PoliTo. Panos is currently a Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, where he leads the Networked Systems Security group. His research agenda includes a gamut of security and privacy problems, with emphasis on wireless and mobile networks. He chairs the ACM WiSec conference steering committee, he is a member of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium Advisory Board and the CANS conference steering committee, and serves as the vice-chair of the ACM Europe Council. Panos is an IEEE Fellow, a Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe, and an ACM Distinguished Member. His group webpage is www.eecs.kth.se/nss.