A Systematic Analysis of 5G Networks With a Focus on 5G Core Security

After many years of work, 5G standards are still under development and the corresponding technical specifications continue to evolve on the fly. At this moment, several countries have started to deploy 5G networks, and most of them have been following a Non-Standalone (NSA) path to incorporate the existing 4G and other legacy networks. Despite all the advertisement efforts, many people still do not have a clear view on how 5G can power all the promised mission-critical applications in a secure manner. In this paper, we bridge this gap by providing a concise review of some 5G’s new features, including the Service Based Architecture (SBA) and key Network Functions (NFs), the new security features in User Equipment (UE) and Radio Access Network (RAN), the new trust model and security mechanisms (e.g. the 5G AKA protocol), and the newly introduced common API framework (CAPIF). Along with the review of new features, we provide our observations on the potential security concerns accompanied with the relevant research results in the literature. We finally point out some new research directions.