Yiwei Zhang

5G and beyond cellular systems embrace the disaggregation of Radio Access Network (RAN) components, exemplified by the evolution of the fronthaul (FH) connection between cellular baseband and radio unit equipment. Crucially, synchronization over the FH is pivotal for reliable 5G services. In recent years, there has been a push to move these links to an Ethernet-based packet network topology, leveraging existing standards and ongoing research for Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN). However, TSN standards, such as Precision Time Protocol (PTP), focus on performance with little to no concern for security. This increases the exposure of the open FH to security risks. Attacks targeting synchronization mechanisms pose significant threats, potentially disrupting 5G networks and impairing connectivity. In this article, we demonstrate the impact of successful spoofing and replay attacks against PTP synchronization. We show how a spoofing attack is able to cause a production-ready O-RAN and 5G-compliant private cellular base station to catastrophically fail within 2 seconds of the attack, necessitating manual intervention to restore full network operations. To counter this, we design a Machine Learning (ML)-based monitoring solution capable of detecting various malicious attacks with over 97.5% accuracy.

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training while preserving user data privacy by keeping data local. Despite these advantages, FL remains vulnerable to privacy attacks on user updates and model parameters during training and deployment. Secure aggregation protocols have been proposed to protect user updates by encrypting them, but these methods often incur high computational costs and are not resistant to quantum computers. Additionally, differential privacy (DP) has been used to mitigate privacy leakages, but existing methods focus on secure aggregation or DP, neglecting their potential synergies. To address these gaps, we introduce $\texttt {Beskar}$, a novel framework that provides post-quantum secure aggregation, optimizes computational overhead for FL settings, and defines a comprehensive threat model that accounts for a wide spectrum of adversaries. We also integrate DP into different stages of FL training to enhance privacy protection in diverse scenarios. Our framework provides a detailed analysis of the trade-offs between security, performance, and model accuracy, representing the first thorough examination of secure aggregation protocols combined with various DP approaches for post-quantum secure FL. $\texttt {Beskar}$ aims to address the pressing privacy and security issues FL while ensuring quantum-safety and robust performance.

Modern smart TVs often communicate with their remote controls (including the smartphone simulated ones) using multiple wireless channels (e.g., Infrared, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi). However, this multi-channel remote control communication introduces a new attack surface. An inherent security flaw is that remote controls of most smart TVs are designed to work in a benign environment rather than an adversarial one, and thus wireless communications between a smart TV and its remote controls are not strongly protected. Attackers can leverage such a flaw to abuse the remote control communication and compromise smart TV systems. In this paper, we propose EVILSCREEN, a novel attack that exploits ill-protected remote control communications to access protected resources of a smart TV or even control the screen. EVILSCREEN exploits a multi-channel remote control mimicry vulnerability present in today smart TVs. Unlike other attacks, which compromise the TV system by exploiting code vulnerabilities or malicious third-party apps, EVILSCREEN directly reuses commands of different remote controls, combines them together to circumvent deployed authentication and isolation policies, and finally accesses or controls TV resources remotely. We evaluated eight mainstream smart TVs and found that they are all vulnerable to EVILSCREEN attacks, including a Samsung product adopting the ISO/IEC security specification.

Massive historical data are stored in chlorine gas monitoring network. So that prediction algorithm of data mining is used to dig historical data not only can make the redundant data reused, but also can forecast the network trend and improve the network early warning model. The chlorine gas monitoring wireless sensor network based on ZigBee was designed in this paper. Then Fletcher-Reeves algorithm was added to dig historical data in the network, forecast the network trend and improve the early warning model. To avoid network monitoring blind areas and save the number of monitoring nodes, the coverage optimal mathematical model of chlorine monitoring wireless sensor network is established. The optimal matching of the node number and the network coverage is realized by using artificial fish-swarm algorithm. The predicted concentration of chlorine data were trained by data mining model. The maximum relative error between predicted concentration and measured concentration was 11.08%, and the maximum average error was 7.36%. And it can satisfy actual requirements.