Invited Paper: Challenges and Opportunities in Enabling Secure 5G Positioning

5G positioning will be a natural component in many anticipated 5G industrial use cases and verticals such as logistics, smart factories, autonomous vehicles, localized sensing, digital twins, augmented and virtual reality. Driven by the aim to support such a wide array of location-aware services and applications, the current release of 5G is exploring positioning as an integral part of 5G technology. In recent years, many attacks on positioning systems have been demonstrated, and hence it is important to build 5G systems that are resilient to location manipulation attacks. In this paper, we describe our vision for the secure 5G positioning infrastructure, which requires support from architecture, positioning protocols, and secure physical layer designs. We discuss that the designs should be optimized for the use cases, as a single higher layer protocol and a physical layer are insufficient to fulfill all applications' availability, latency, security, and privacy requirements. We further discuss positioning for autonomous vehicles where secure 5G positioning will help in collision avoidance, phantom vehicle detection, and navigation in the presence of an adversary.