Article

Special issue on Advancements in 5G Networks Security

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Abstract

5G is a paradigm-shifting communications technology that is envisioned to provide an even wider range of high-quality services than 4G. It promises to offer high bandwidth and ultra-low latency, which are desirable not only for voice and mobile broadband, but also for new vertical industries such as healthcare, public transport, manufacturing, media and entertainment. Therefore, secure network architectures, mechanisms, and protocols are necessary to for a foundation of 5G to address potential security threats. This special issue is focusing on original research results and achievements by scientists, designers, and developers working on various issues and challenges related to 5G networks security.

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Since the 1980s, and particularly with the Hopfield model, recurrent neural networks or RNN became a topic of great interest. The first works of neural networks consisted of simple systems of a few neurons that were commonly simulated through analogue electronic circuits. The passage from the equations to the circuits was carried out directly without justification and subsequent formalisation. The present work shows a way to formally obtain the equivalence between an analogue circuit and a neural network and formalizes the connection between both systems. We also show which are the properties that these electrical networks must satisfy. We can have confidence that the representation in terms of circuits is mathematically equivalent to the equations that represent the network.
Chapter
Wireless systems have evolved and are becoming increasingly important because of their capacity and flexibility to support new services and technologies such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine type communications (mMTC), massive internet of things (mIoT) and ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC). This paper presents a systematic review of the status of the fifth-generation or 5G wireless system, addresses its physical architecture as well as the service-based architecture. The main elements of network slicing as a different vision of 5G, in response to the need to split the physical network into multiple logical networks to serve various types of services based on different requirements. Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) are also presented as tools needed for network resource management. The main security challenges of 5G networks are analyzed and possible solutions are discussed. A comparative analysis is presented of 5G versus its 4G predecessor.
Chapter
With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), its uses have been growing enormously in the smart healthcare sector. IoT devices in smart healthcare range from simple wristband devices capable of monitoring the heart rate, sleep pattern, and blood pressure to connected inhalers, ingestible sensors, glucose monitoring, and remote patient monitoring systems. To fulfill the requirements of smart healthcare, these devices need to have reliable connectivity and must comply with the security and privacy regulations. To resolve the connectivity issue in healthcare, 5G networks are being deployed. Implementation of 5G in blockchain-based smart healthcare will bring many advantages such as faster and seamless data transfer of patients’ medical records, real-time monitoring of patients at remote locations, 5G-powered telesurgery, and monitoring of smart IoT devices. This chapter provides a detailed literature review in this field to understand concepts of blockchain in the healthcare industry. Blockchain technology, its mechanisms, 5G technology, and Blockchain 5.0-based smart healthcare are described. Applications of Blockchain 5.0 in healthcare informatics are discussed in detail. A comparative analysis of existing models on electronic health records is performed and one case study is considered to understand the application of blockchain in healthcare. The challenges for 5G-enabled blockchain technology in the healthcare sector are also addressed, which provides an opportunity for researchers to resolve these issues for better performance of the system.
Chapter
5G networks are poised to satisfy the anticipated growth in Internet of Technology (IoT) devices and their related systems. The invasion of 5G networks brings along with it an accelerated need for security and privacy. The need for tailor-made security solutions has become the need of the hour to ensure data integrity, confidentiality, and authentication in 5G-based IoT networks. Since IoT initiates sensors and actuators in a totally smart environment, IoT security will involve protecting the total deployment architecture of IoT from internal and external attacks. Integration of cryptographical algorithms and quantum cryptography has been used effectively to secure data in 5G networks. Privacy and identity management has been a mandatory requirement in networks carrying delicate data involved in retail shops, traffic services, and health monitoring systems. Securing data in 5G and IoT networks and detection of trustworthy and rogue nodes, proper monitoring, logging, and broadcasting are the vital necessities of any security system. The exhaustive survey on the security issues in the 5G-IoT scenario, highlights the application of the latest technologies, incorporation of hybrid methodologies in securing them, and also emphasizes on the open issues yet to be addressed and research challenges that are to be explored.
Article
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The fifth generation of mobile networks, 5G, is expected to support a set of many requirements and use cases such as handling connectivity for a massive number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices. Authenticating IoT devices and controlling their access to the network plays a vital role in the security of these devices and of the whole cellular system. In current cellular networks, as well as in 3GPP specifications release 16 on 5G, the AAC (Authentication and Access Control) of IoT devices is done in the same manner as the AAC of MBB (Mobile Broadband) UE (User Equipment). Considering the expected growth of IoT devices, this will likely induce a very high load on the connectivity provider’s CN (Core Network) and cause network failures. To manage the AAC of this massive number of devices, we propose an SSAAC (Slice Specific Authentication and Access Control) mechanism that makes use of the flexibility provided by virtualization technologies. This mechanism allows the authentication and access control of IoT devices to be delegated to the 3rd parties providing these devices, thereby decreasing the load of the connectivity provider’s CN, while increasing the flexibility and modularity of the whole 5G network. We evaluate the feasibility of our proposal with the OAI (Open Air Interface) open-source platform. Next, we provide a security analysis of the proposal and highlight the security requirements to use with this proposal. We also evaluate the impact of this delegation approach on the network load considering the anticipated number of AAC signaling messages compared to the existing AAC mechanisms in cellular networks. According to these evaluations, our approach is feasible and it would provide cellular networks the opportunity to overcome the security shortcomings in their AAC mechanisms. It also considerably reduces the AAC signaling load on the connectivity provider’s CN.
Article
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Physical layer security based on non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and artificial jamming (AJ) is considered in a one-way amplify-and-forward (AF) relay network with an untrusted relay. In the first phase of the two-phase operation of the untrusted AF relay network, a source node transmits the first information and AJ symbols, and the destination decodes the AJ symbol first and waits for the relayed replica of the first information symbol, which is forwarded by the untrusted relay. In the second phase, the source sends the second information symbol and the relay amplifies and forwards the received signal in the first phase with a fixed gain. In such an operation scenario, an untrusted relay tries to eavesdrop on the information signal while relaying the received signal properly. To decode the information symbol, the destination cancels out the AJ signal and then decodes the first information symbol by combining the signals received during the two phases. Finally, the second information symbol is decoded with the second-phase signal after cancelling out all the other symbols, i.e., the first information and AJ symbols. The eavesdropper and relay try to eavesdrop on the information signal with all possible orders of interference cancellation, i.e., NOMA receive processing. In this study, an ergodic secrecy rate is derived according to the operation scenario during the two phases. The behaviours of the ergodic secrecy rate with respect to power allocation to two information symbols as well as an AJ symbol are investigated. It is shown that the expected secrecy rate can be maximized by selecting the transmit power and rates for the three symbols properly. It is also demonstrated that the proposed physical layer security scheme achieves a higher secrecy rate than a secure beamformed transmission based on NOMA and artificial noise.
Article
Software-defined networking (SDN) is an emerging networking technology, which has attracted wide attention from academia and industry, playing a key role in enabling techniques of the 5th generation wireless systems (5G). The fundamental characteristic of SDN is that it decouples the control plane from the data plane, which can provide flexibility and programmability for 5G. Unfortunately, the separation of the two planes becomes a potential attack surface as well, which enables adversaries to fingerprint and attack the SDNs. Existing work showed the possibility of fingerprinting an SDN with time-based features. However, they are coarse-grained. This paper proposes a fine-grained fingerprinting approach that reveals the much more severe threats to SDN security and explores the mitigation strategies. By analyzing network packets, the approach can dig out sensitive and control-related information, i.e., match fields of SDN flow rules. The match fields of flow rules can be used to infer the type of an SDN controller and the security policy of an SDN network. With sensitive configuration information, adversaries can launch more targeted and destructive attacks against an SDN. We implement our approach in both simulated and physical environments with different kinds of SDN controllers to verify the effectiveness of our concept. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility to obtain fine-grained and highly sensitive information in SDN, and hence reveal the high risk of information disclosure in SDN and severe threats of attacks against SDN. To mitigate the fine-grained fingerprinting threat we have revealed, we explore a lightweight countermeasure trying to hide the sensitive time-based features of SDN networks. Implementation and evaluation demonstrate that our countermeasure can play a role in mitigating the risk of SDN control information leakage with only minor overheads.
Article
In the commercial launches of Long-term evolution machine type communication (LTE-M), which includes enhanced machine type communication or machine to machine (M2M) communication in the Long-term evolution (LTE), the security issues is worth the attention. Several security problems have been discovered in LTE-M. One such important problem is the non-authenticated usage of the subscriber identity module (SIM) cards. Because M2M communications are not human-centric, the common personal identification number (PIN) code verification mechanism is not suitable for the machine driven communications. In this paper, we propose two approaches to solve the non-authenticated SIM card usage problem by restricting the code in the SIM card to the specific user device. One approach, named IMEI–IMSI pairing, is an enhancement of the original authentication mechanism which performs device authentication by pairing the International Mobile Equipment Identification Number (IMEI), the device’s unique code, and the International Mobile Subscriber Identification Number (IMSI), which is the SIM card’s unique code. Besides ClockSkew-IMSI pairing, the other approach, leverages certain hardware characteristics which are difficult to alter. In particular, we make use of the clock skew, which for each device is slightly different. To evaluate our methods, we implement two approaches on OpenAirInterface, an open source 5G development platform. In comparison to the method proposed for 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), both of our approaches are more efficient in achieving secure device authentication.
Article
5G promises to expand the realm of mobile communication beyond LTE by enabling vehicles, sensors and other countless devices to interact and share data over the cellular network. In the era of 5G, it is expected that the amount of mobile data will surpass that of wired data. To unlock the full potential of 5G, it is imperative to address the shortcomings of LTE, particularly the security weakness in handover. In LTE, the key derivation scheme used in handover does not support full forward key separation, which makes the network not only vulnerable to attacks but also prone to latency. Therefore, a novel approach is introduced using blockchain to overcome the issues. Blockchain is a technology originally developed to support Bitcoin to securely make financial transactions without an intermediary like a bank. Some of the innate security features of blockchain are evolved to support a structurally secure key derivation scheme for handover in 5G with full forward key separation. The paper reviews extensively on the security benefits of the new key derivation scheme using blockchain and demonstrates the simulation results using a custom application written in JavaScript to verify the performance enhancement.
Article
Internet of Nano-Things (IoNT) overcomes critical difficulties and additionally open doors for wearable sensor based huge information examination. Conventional computing and/or communication systems do not offer enough flexibility and adaptability to deal with the gigantic amount of assorted information nowadays. This creates the need for legitimate components that can efficiently investigate and communicate the huge data while maintaining security and quality of service. In addition, while developing the ultra-wide Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) associated with the ongoing Big Data project and 5G-based IoNT, it is required to resolve the emerging difficulties as well. Accordingly, these difficulties and other relevant design issues have been comprehensively reported in this survey. It mainly focuses on security issues and associated intelligence to be considered while managing these issues.
Article
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have evolved to become an integral part of the contemporary Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. The sensor node activities of both sensing phenomena in their immediate environments and reporting their findings to a centralized base station (BS) have remained a core platform to sustain heterogeneous service-centric applications. However, the adversarial threat to the sensors of the IoT paradigm remains significant. Denial of service (DoS) attacks, comprising a large volume of network packets, targeting a given sensor node(s) of the network, may cripple routine operations and cause catastrophic losses to emergency services. This paper presents an intelligent DoS detection framework comprising modules for data generation, feature ranking and generation, and training and testing. The proposed framework is experimentally tested under actual IoT attack scenarios, and the accuracy of the results is greater than that of traditional classification techniques.
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Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the rising innovations of the current era that has largely attracted both the industry and the academia. Life without the IoT is entirely indispensable. To dispel the doubts, if any, about the widespread adoption, the IoT certainly necessitates both technically and logically correct solutions to ensure the underlying security and privacy. This paper explicitly investigates the security issues in the perception layer of IoT, the countermeasures and the research challenges faced for large scale deployment of IoT. Perception layer being one of the important layers in IoT is responsible for data collection from things and its successful transmission for further processing. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we describe the crucial components of the IoT (i.e., architectures, standards, and protocols) in the context of security at perception layer followed by IoT security requirements. Secondly, after describing the generic IoT-layered security, we focus on two key enabling technologies (i.e., RFID and sensor network) at the perception layer. We categorize and classify various attacks at different layers of both of these technologies through taxonomic classification and discuss possible solutions. Finally, open research issues and challenges relevant to the perception layer are identified and analyzed.
Article
MIMO technology is a key technology of 5G, which is widely used in next-generation scenarios such as heterogeneous networks, millimeter-wave networks, and automotive networks. How to build a large-scale MIMO system security situation assessment model for 5G has become the main topic of current concern. This paper analyzes the situational awareness theory of 5g-oriented MIMO system security. Firstly, based on the theory of MIMO system, the influence of MIMO system on 5G network security and the theory of situation awareness technology, the security situation awareness system model of 5g-oriented large-scale MIMO system is constructed. In the security situation assessment section of the MIMO system, according to the rules of evidence reasoning, of different active attack and passive eavesdropping two kinds of empowerment behavior under different attribute data, and then put the empowerment process of average power and large scale attenuation coefficient, interrupt probability, series, and maintain confidentiality gain data as model inputs, such as implementing MIMO system level of situation assessment. In the security situation prediction part of MIMO system, based on the actual situation level of the system as the criterion, 30 sets of experimental simulation data are used to predict the next moment situation level of the MIMO system. In order to verify the stability and validity of the model, MATLAB is used to simulate the experiment. The results show that the mean square error RMSE of different iterations is kept below 0.02, and the TSQ values of both sides are kept below 0.16. The overall prediction effect of the model was good, indicating that the system could provide effective decision support for 5G MIMO security situation prediction
Integration of VANET and 5G security: Design and implementation issues
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