Analysis of Potential Threats in NextGen 5G Core

The NextGen 5G core foundations will rely on soft-ware and programmability which are essential for the evolution of the future mobile network architecture. While the 3GPP specifications trace the key functionality between Network Functions (NFs) communication, there are many security concerns which derive from the new service deployment models against potential attacks on the main interfaces. Therefore, the protection of both signaling and user plane traffic becomes a must according to the 3GPP requirements. In this paper we simulate two use cases of attacks on the control and user plane using a traffic replay simulator dedicated to 5G Service-Based Architecture (SBA). In order to capture the behavior of NFs, we deploy the Open5GS core as microservices and we inject a service mesh solution to analyze the Access and Mobility Management Function (AMF) throughput response under the two attack scenarios.