5G Security and Privacy: A Research Roadmap
This work tackles critical security issues for 5G infrastructure, which is essential for global communication networks, but it is incremental as it builds on existing analyses and proposes a roadmap rather than presenting new results.
The paper addresses the challenge of ensuring security and privacy in complex 5G cellular networks by outlining recent approaches for analyzing 4G LTE and 5G protocols and introducing a research roadmap covering formal analyses, software verification, defense design, and application security.
Cellular networks represent a critical infrastructure and their security is thus crucial. 5G - the latest generation of cellular networks - combines different technologies to increase capacity, reduce latency, and save energy. Due to its complexity and scale, however, ensuring its security is extremely challenging. In this white paper, we outline recent approaches supporting systematic analyses of 4G LTE and 5G protocols and their related defenses and introduce an initial security and privacy roadmap, covering different research challenges, including formal and comprehensive analyses of cellular protocols as defined by the standardization groups, verification of the software implementing the protocols, the design of robust defenses, and application and device security.