Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Pennsylvania State University
W362 Westgate Bldg, University Park, PA 16802
Email: mba5773@psu.edu, mujtahid.akon@gmail.com
I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at Pennsylvania State University, currently working as a Graduate Research Assistant under the supervision of Dr. Syed Rafiul Hussain. Prior to this, I served as a lecturer in the Department of CSE at BRAC University and gained valuable industry experience as a software engineer at Reve Systems.
My research focuses on advancing the security and privacy of emerging wireless communication protocols and complex computer systems, including cellular networks(4G/5G), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and IoT. I analyze network protocol designs and software implementations from a security perspective (e.g., authentication, access control) to develop security technologies and novel frameworks that can be used to systematically identify security vulnerabilities and privacy risks. To achieve this, I combine theory and practice by drawing inspiration from formal methods, program analysis and software testing, and NLP. My current research endeavor concentrates on the systematic analysis of complex access control systems using automated reasoning and formal methods.
My research has resulted in several changes in the design of 5G Security Standards. My work has uncovered multiple security vulnerabilities in the 5G core's access control, earning me recognition and commendation from the GSMA Mobile Security Research (formerly known as the GSMA Mobile Security Research Hall of Fame).
I completed my Bachelor of Science (B.Sc. Engg.) from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in September 2017.
In gratitude to my community, I volunteered as an associate editor and writer at Byapon, a national youth science magazine published bi-monthly, from 2015 to 2022. My role involved promoting science among secondary and higher secondary grade students through writing articles on popular science and arranging seminars and science fests.
April 2025: CoreScan has been accepted at IEEE S&P 2025. Paper Link
August 2024: Our findings from 5GCVerif have resulted in several critical changes (totaling 279 words in TS 33.501) in the 5G standards to bolster 5G Core Network Security through many Change Requests (CRs) to 3GPP.
October 2023: Hermes has been accepted at USENIX Security’24. Paper Link
October 2023: Received ACM CCS Travel Grant Award 2023.
July 2023: 5GCVerif has been accepted at CCS 2023. Paper Link
July 2023: Our proposed six 5G Core Network attacks have been acknowledged by GSMA (CVD-2023-0069).
January 2022: Started working as a Graduate Research Assistant at Pennsylvania State University.
January 2022: Started Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering at Pennsylvania State University.
October 2021: ADACT published in Bioinformatics Journal.
May 2018: Joined as a full-time lecturer in the Department of CSE at BRAC University.
November 2017: Started working as a junior software engineer (iOS) at Reve Systems.
[C3] CoreScan: From Control to Chaos: A Comprehensive Formal Analysis of 5G’s Access Control
Mujtahid Akon, Md Toufikuzzaman, Syed Rafiul Hussain
The 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P) 2025
[C2] Hermes: Unlocking Security Analysis of Cellular Network Protocols by Synthesizing Finite State Machines from Natural Language Specifications
Abdullah Al Ishtiaq, Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Syed Md Mukit Rashid, Ali Ranjbar, Kai Tu, Tianwei Wu, Zhezheng Song, Weixuan Wang, Mujtahid Akon, Rui Zhang, Syed Rafiul Hussain
The 33rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security), 2024.
[C1] 5GCVerif: Formal Analysis of Access Control Mechanism of 5G Core Network
Mujtahid Akon, Tianchang Yang, Yilu Dong, Syed Rafiul Hussain
The 30th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2023.
[J1] ADACT: a tool for analysing (dis)similarity among nucleotide and protein sequences using minimal and relative absent words
Mujtahid Akon, Muntashir Akon, Mohimenul Kabir, M Saifur Rahman, M Sohel Rahman
Bioinformatics, Volume 37, Issue 10, May 2021, Pages 1468–1470