Altaf Shaik, Technical University of Berlin gave a talk on LTE network Automation under threat on 31 January.

The control and management of mobile networks is shifting from manual to automatic in order to boost performance and efficiency and reduce expenditures. Especially, base stations in today’s 4G/LTE networks can automatically configure and operate themselves which is technically referred to as Self Organizing Networks (SON). Additionally, they can auto-tune themselves by learning from their surrounding base stations. His talk inspects the consequences of operating a rogue base station in an automated 4G/LTE network. His research work exploits the weaknesses he discovered in 4G/LTE mobile phones and SON protocols to inject malicious packets into the network, demonstrate several attacks against the network and discussed mitigation from the mobile network operators perspective.

Altaf Shaik is currently pursuing Ph.D at the Technical University of Berlin. He is experienced in analyzing 2G-4G cellular network technologies from radio to networking protocol layers. His recent renowned research includes low-cost 4G IMSI catchers and security issues in several cellular baseband chipsets and operational mobile networks. He is currently contributing to the 5G standard development.