Securing the Cloud-Native 5G Control Plane

The shift to cloud-native architectures in the 5G control plane introduces significant challenges in securing complex network functions deployed as microservices. Traditional security mechanisms, such as service mesh architectures and kernel-level solutions, often suffer from protocol limitations, high overhead, or incomplete inter-service encryption. Therefore, we present Zero Trust X Security Enforcement Microservice (ZTX-SEM), a protocol-agnostic zero-trust security solution designed specifically for cloud-native deployments. We propose a lightweight packet interception mechanism that operates across all protocols, a proactive authentication strategy that reduces latency and ensures continuous readiness, and an optimized secret key lookup that accelerates encrypted communication processing. Our experiments on a Kubernetes-deployed 5G control plane (core) demonstrate that ZTX-SEM outperforms existing solutions such as Istio, achieving 75% and 28% reductions in resource utilization and session setup times, respectively.