Techniques for Realizing Secure, Resilient and Differentiated 5G Operations

The 5G ecosystem is designed as a highly sophisticated and modularized architecture that decouples the radio access network (RAN), the multi-access edge computing (MEC) and the mobile core to enable different and scalable deployments. It leverages modern principles of virtualized network functions, microservices-based service chaining, and cloud-native software stacks. Moreover, it provides built-in security and mechanisms for slicing. Despite all these capabilities, there remain many gaps and opportunities for additional capabilities to support end-to-end secure operations for applications across many domains. Although 5G supports mechanisms for network slicing and tunneling, new algorithms and mechanisms that can adapt network slice configurations dynamically to accommodate urgent and mission-critical traffic are needed. Such slices must be secure, interference-aware, and free of side channel attacks. Resilience of the 5G ecosystem itself requires an effective means for observability and (semi-)autonomous self-healing capabilities. To address this plethora of challenges, this paper presents the SECurity and REsiliency TEchniques for Differentiated 5G OPerationS (SECRETED 5G OPS) project, which is investigating fundamental new solutions that center on the zero trust, network slicing, and network augmentation dimensions, which together will achieve secure and differentiated operations in 5G networks. SECRETED 5G OPS solutions are designed to be easily deployable, minimally invasive to the existing infrastructure, not require modifications to user equipment other than possibly firmware upgrades, economically viable, standards compliant, and compliant to regulations.