Enhanced 5G Security

Industry partner

NEC

Description

Security and privacy in 5G are highly challenging. As 5G connects everyone to everything everywhere, the 5G network is a rich source of critical information, from personal data and business assets, to mission-critical sensor data. To protect highly valuable information, 3GPP specifies the security aspects of the 5G system. The most significant 5G security enhancements compared to the previous generations are access-agnostic primary authentication, secure key establishment and management, and service-based architecture security.

Network slicing is the foundation of 5G security enhancements. 5G network slicing splits shared network resources into logical or virtual networks to satisfy specific service requirements that adhere to a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Each slice has isolation from the other network slices, achieving higher security with precise access control. To this end, different mechanisms may be envisioned for logical network isolation, e.g., VLAN, Openflow, or other NFV mechanisms. Yet, no network slicing mechanism has been proposed that suits for 5G environment.

The goal of this project is to leverage network programmability and cryptographic features that the next-generation Internet architecture delivers to enable:
i) dynamic network isolation at UE (User Equipment)-granularity, ii) network isolation continuity across remote edge networks even through the public Internet, iii) highly secure access control in network slice transit with cryptographic protection, and iv) scalable key establishment and management mechanisms.

Publications

Jonghoon Kwon, Taeho Lee, Claude Hähni, and Adrian Perrig.
SVLAN: Secure & Scalable Network Virtualization.
In Proceedings of the Symposium on Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) 2020.
[PDF]

Jonghoon Kwon, Claude Hähni, Patrick Bamert, and Adrian Perrig.
MONDRIAN: Comprehensive Inter-domain Network Zoning Architecture.
In Proceedings of the Symposium on Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) 2021.
[PDF]

Shohei Mitani, Jonghoon Kwon, Nakul Ghate, Taniya Singh, Hirofumi Ueda, and Adrian Perrig.
Qualitative Intention-aware Attribute-based Access Control Policy Refinement.
In Proceedings of ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT) 2023.
[PDF]