Elisa Bertino

Elisa Bertino

Awards

IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award

Biography

Elisa Bertino’s work improving the security of 4G and 5G cellular networks provided tools that help identify vulnerabilities to protect these critical infrastructures. To secure cellular networks, she developed comprehensive methodologies to systematically analyze their many protocols. With LTEInspector, Bertino and her collaborators identified 10 new vulnerabilities in 4G networks, including the lack of digital signatures on messages broadcast by cell towers and lack of reply protections for some messages. She then led the design of 5GReasoner as a more sophisticated analysis framework for 5G networks able to analyze multiple protocols, which identified 11 new vulnerabilities. Her contributions are critical to defending against attacks that could impair everything from mobile phones to many other advanced applications that rely on cellular networks for communicating.

An IEEE Fellow, Bertino is the Samuel D. Conte Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.