8 Security Aspects

Considerations for 5G network security may be built on top of 4G security as it has not shown significant weaknesses by now and backwards compatibility or interworking needs to be guaranteed. Integrity will play a more vital role, e.g. for autonomous driving. 5G trust model will not only involve subscriber, home, and serving network, but give rise to extended requirement such as authentication between various actors, accountability, and non-repudiation. The use of clouds and virtualization emphasizes the dependency on secure software, and leads to other effects on security. The software can no longer rely on the specific security attributes of a dedicated hardware platform. Standard interfaces to the computing and network platforms are necessary to ensure a manageable approach to security. Attack resistance needs to considered in the design of the network.

Challenges will be amongst others: integrating traffic off-load options to non 3GPP networks; fast handover authentication and authentication between different networks; privacy protection for frequent handovers and device-to-device communication; security in massive MIMO systems (antenna correlation, confidential broadcasting, hardware impairments); cloud and crowd computing.