Personal Statement
Hello, my name is Oscar Llerena. I am the older son of a family made up of my mother and two sisters. We are a modest family with not many luxuries in life, and I have always thought that education is the best way to have an opportunity to prosper in life. My mother was a school teacher and, since I was a kid, she always managed to bring me books and magazines so I can spend time reading. I clearly remember an article that recounted the famous hacker Kevin Mitnick's capture by FBI agent Tsumoto Shimomura for the crimes related to call interception and computer fraud. I was amazed by the story. I wanted to understand the details of Mitnick's attacks and how Shimomura managed to ambush and capture him. Therefore, after high school, I entered the Telecom School at UNI to study communications protocols.
Unfortunately, some events happened in my family and, from the early years of my studies, I had to divide my time between classes and work schedules. Then, in 2007, I got a job at the airport as a security agent for American Airlines (AA). They sent me for a month for training at the AA Headquarters in Dallas, USA. That job gave me an inside approach to the security protocols involved in the dispatch of a flight and it was my first approach to a security system. However, I needed to pursue jobs more related to my telecom carrier. Then, in 2009, I got a job at the TIWS network operation center. TIWS is the operator of the SAm-1 submarine fiber optic system. It was my first approach inside a big-scale telecommunications network. I learned about communications protocols, networking, and security systems. Then, in 2012, I won a Brazilian scholarship to do an M.Sc. degree in Telecommunications and Telematic at UNICAMP. It is at this stage that I became very interested in academic research. I made up my mind to obtain a research position in the R&D department of a telecom operator after obtaining the M.Sc. Degree.
Then, in 2015, I returned to Peru and joined AT&T DirecTV Peru as a KPI supervisor for a 4G-LTE network that was starting a deployment from scratch. It was a great chance to develop a carrier inside an international company. In the same year, I obtained the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEHv9) certification to regain my interest in cybersecurity issues. Everything seemed to be stable for me until the end of 2016 when AT&T USA ordered to stop the network deployment in Peru. In consequence, I lost my job because there was no more network to deploy. I took that lapse of time to re-evaluate my professional career. It had always been linked to operations jobs to produce telecom services but not entirely inside research areas. I did not feel comfortable with that and far from reinserting myself again into any job, I took the opportunity to rethink my objectives. Then, I decided to support my research in cybersecurity threats starting from what I knew most: mobile networks. I acquired expensive software-defined radio (SDR) equipment. I taught myself into Linux OS from scratch and managed to implement short-range cellular base stations to replicate different attacks referenced in academic articles. It took me a while but in 2018, as a result of that work, I entered as a researcher to the Embedded Systems Lab at the INICTEL-UNI institute. I was in charge of the communications protocols and system security for the IoT applications that we implement at the lab. Also, I became a professor of the Wireless Communication Systems postgraduation course at the Telecommunications School at UNI. Furthermore, in November 2019, I won a grant to attend the "Leaders in Innovation 2019" program in London-UK, organized by The Royal Academy of Engineering and The Newton Fund. Then, I published a paper at the "Software-Defined Systems 2020" international congress. In retrospect, changing my career direction towards research and encouraging my desire to delve into cybersecurity issues was the best decision I took. Today, my motivation is to study the methods to ensure information exchange in IoT environments. I am very interested in researching potential vulnerabilities and exploits of decentralized ledge technologies such Blockchain and IOTA, which are currently emerging. However, at some point, they probably will be extensively used. My goal is to become an academic researcher that can provide well-founded advice regarding cybersecurity and telecommunications issues. If the committee allows me to study for a Ph.D. in cybersecurity at SeoulTech, I will take advantage of this opportunity. I will effort to produce high-quality academic articles in Q1 cybersecurity journals each year and to successfully defend my Ph.D. thesis dissertation. Thus, once I return to Peru, I will use my position as a UNI professor to promote innovative proposals in the cybersecurity and telecommunications sector by winning local and international funds. Those funds will finance solutions implementations to overcome current trust-issues on information exchange in my country. Thanks for the opportunity.