Technical Outcomes of 5G PPP Cross-project Workshop

5G PPP cross project workshop last February gathered experts from the 5G PPP to take stock of current progress at the technological level and chart a course for future priority actions.

Pascal Bisson, Thales and Technical Coordinator of 5G-ENSURE, chaired the session on 5G Security. He was joined by representatives from CHARISMA, METIS-II, and SUPERFLUIDITY to discuss major security issues in 5G and how these 5G PPP projects are addressing them. A summary of the main outcomes follows.

5G-ENSURE outputs for 5G  Security

• The diverse set of use cases identified by 5G-ENSURE illustrate increased complexity of actors in 5G and related security issues.
• The security architecture leverages the current 4G architecture (TS 33.401) with its "strata" and "domains" and aims to address major gaps and changes brought by 5G, including a new trust model.
• The enablers focus on areas of major concerns: authentication, authorisation and accounting; privacy; trust; security; monitoring; network management and virtualisation isolation. Each enabler comes with a product vision, open specifications and reference implementation.
• The 5G test-bed is a a key asset, designed to meet the security requirements against the threats emerging from the use cases identified by 5G-ENSURE.

Security Aspects in CHARISMA

• Secure end-to-end services for 5G networks: security and policy management; decision control for threat detection; virtualisation isolation; identity and access management; proactive traffic and resource monitoring.
• Open Access Manager: Infrastructure sharing with centralised management enabling multi-tenancy. Infrastructure providers can offer end-to-end network slices to VNOs.
• Virtualised Security Functions: A virtualised intrusion and detection systems (IDS) and a virtualised firewall (vFW).

METIS-II on 5G Security from RAN perspective

• Security is becoming evermore important as computational abilities to "crack" security increases.
• METIS-II focuses on network access security and how this affects AS signaling and the RAN functions such as mobility.
• 5G requirements from 38.913: mobility enhancements, inactive state transmission and tight interworking between NR and LTE.

SUPERFLUIDITY on Network Security

• Verification can offer guarantees on network security.
• SELF - Network modelling language designed for SE.
• Symnet - fast symbolic execution engine for SELF.
• CTL - policy specification language.

Post-event report from METIS-II.

Social media reach: we are delighted to announce that the takeaway message from the workshop was Top Media Tweet on 5G-ENSURE in February, illustrating wide interest in the technology progress of 5G.