Project Grant 2210379

This three-year, $225,000 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering program (CFDA 47.070) will support research to develop security and privacy solutions for 5G and beyond cellular networks. The Regents of the University of California at Riverside, in collaboration with researchers in Japan, will pursue technical tasks to design a heterogeneous data plane framework combining multiple programmable data plane devices for network function processing. Most traffic will be processed by high-speed programmable switches extracting coarse-grained metrics, while suspicious traffic will be redirected to programmable network interface cards or host servers for deeper inspection. The researchers will also develop real-time cellular traffic monitoring at the core network as a vantage point to detect data and control plane attacks. Finally, the team will design privacy protection mechanisms ensuring user anonymity against fingerprinting attacks through traffic morphing techniques leveraging the programmable, heterogeneous data plane capabilities. The research aims to significantly strengthen threat prevention and privacy preservation for cellular network users and traffic.