Cybersecurity Challenges That Could Potentially Arise In The 5g Era

5G services in India have officially been launched earlier on Saturday by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the sixth edition of the India Mobile Congress.

With the coming of 5G and the use cases and implementations, it would bring with it, there is also a possibility of unforeseen threats and cybersecurity risks that users need to be prepared for.

“In preparing to use 5G, organizations should pay close attention to the software-defined aspect of 5G infrastructure. It is very different from the Wi-Fi and 4G networks in use today. Implementing 5G network security requires a risk management framework that adapts to the flexibility and programmability of network services and traffic flows in software-defined networks,” says Anil Ramcharan, Advisory Principal, Deloitte and Touche LLP.

Speaking about how 5G security concerns differ from the previous generations, Wendy Frank, Principal, Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory, said, “One of the inherent vulnerabilities in 4G and LTE networks is that a subscriber’s unique identifier is unencrypted. 5G fixes that and helps identify and defend against ‘man-in-the-middle; attacks. In addition, 5G’s unified authentication framework improves usability, connectivity, and endpoint security by allowing open and network-agnostic authentication with 4G, LTE, Wi-Fi, and cable networks.”

She also added that 5G is built for efficient network slicing, which allows customers to segregate sensitive and more generic data and provide precise security and privacy controls in the different slices. 5G networks are also built with hardware and software and use the cloud, so it has a much larger attack surface. An important part of our discussions with customers is how to design and build 5G security from the start.

Rahul Sasi, co-founder and CEO of CloudSEK, believes that the cyber threats impacting 5G won’t be because of its architecture but rather because of implantation flaws in 5G and the new technologies that started because of 5G.

“5G architecture is built on top of API, the same technology stack that powers the web. This means the future of telecom security would be in the hands of web hackers. Low-skilled web hackers might be able to read a voice message if a 5G network is not implemented correctly.” he added.

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