Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Safeguarding Next-Generation Emergency Services (NG-9-1-1) over Cellular Networks: From Design to Practice

The next-generation 9-1-1 (NG-9-1-1) services are IP-based systems that supports all types of emergency communications, e.g., voice, video, and text. The globally deployed 5G/4G cellular networks with ubiquitous coverage are the most accessible vehicles for emergency services. However, the security of IP-based cellular emergency services is still largely unexplored. Since 911 services are critical to our society, it is extremely important to eliminate potential vulnerabilities and ensure their security. This project aims to safeguard NG-9-1-1 services over cellular networks from their designs to operations. The project's novelties are to systematically uncover insecure design defects, operational slips, and implementation flaws of cellular emergency services while ensuring sustainable security through a multi-disciplinary approach. The project's broader significance and importance are to extend the state-of-the-art emergency service security research to a new frontier by exploring novel methods that can help perform innovative emergency service modeling, vulnerability analysis, data collection/mining, and testing automation solutions. The project also aims to contribute to nation's future workforce by training students in critical areas such as network security, wireless and mobile systems, and machine learning. This project comprises three research thrusts: (1) to develop new techniques for discovering design flaws of cellular emergency services. This thrust will build a novel multi-level emergency service verifier that adopts and applies model-checking techniques to formally examine diversified cellular emergency service specifications, requirements, and regulations efficiently; (2) to create new techniques that can analyze and identify both implementation issues and potential operational slips of emergency services. A software-defined-radio NG-9-1-1 service platform will be developed. A comprehensive testing dataset will be built to cover both abnormal and normal use scenarios; and (3) to build an NG-9-1-1 service testing platform that allows automatic checking and follow-on re-examination of discovered vulnerabilities to ensure sustainable security. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.