Robert Ghilduta

Unmasking the Airwaves and Wireless Vulnerabilities

The communication technologies that connect us and serve us every day from FM radio to GPS, WiFi and cellular devices are powered radio frequency based wireless technologies. These devices contain complicated software stacks that often are not properly secured or threat modeled. This talk will survey the world of Radio Frequency (RF) technologies, their vulnerabilities, impact, and potential mitigations. Vulnerabilities to attacks such as replay, mimicking, and jamming are unique to RF technologies, however many high impact vulnerabilities are exposed through unauthenticated wireless interfaces in popular protocols such as WiFi and 3GPP LTE. Side channel attacks and more esoteric attacks will be covered as well.

Robert Ghilduta is a telecommunications and Software Defined Radio expert, and President of Nuand LLC. Robert’s expertise in Digital Signal Processing and his company’s wireless products have been widely used in security research, industry, and defense. During his career, Robert has worked on and led the development of Mixed Signal and Digital Logic VLSI designs, broadband modem IP, and other applications of applied math and statistics. Robert is also an active angel investor based in the San Francisco Bay Area, focusing on early-stage information security, telecommunication, and deep technology startups. Previously, Robert was a Staff Security Engineer at Robinhood and Member of Technical Staff at Meraki (acquired by Cisco) where he led the software engineering of several generations of enterprise Access Point products. Robert earned a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Engineer with a focus in Electrical Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology.