Cellular networks have become an inseparable part of everyday lives. Newer generations of cellular network infrastructure such as the 5G have become more complicated, and their developments will take larger effort and longer time. In order to reduce the dependence of cellular infrastructure on foreign providers, and thus to improve the security of the national information framework, it is necessary to facilitate the rapid development of open-source and secure software for new generations of cellular networks. A big challenge in these efforts is how to quickly generate secure open-source code according to the changing NextG protocol standards. This research project develops an automatic, secure, and scalable tool-chain to accelerate the translation of NextG protocol documents into executable code.

The project leverages technical advancements in formal language for protocol description, formal verification for security analysis, and program synthesis for code generation. These components are tightly integrated to explore a radical and game-changing approach to the protocol software synthesis. The output of the research is a sequence of tools that start with NextG documents, produce I/O Automata representation of the protocols, and finally generate secure open-source code. Formal security analysis is also conducted on the I/O Automata representation to identify and remove vulnerabilities.

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.