A Survey on Security and Privacy of 5G Technologies: Potential Solutions, Recent Advancements, and Future Directions

TLDR

Security is a primary concern in telecommunications, with increasing complexity and high consequences for 5G networks, as incidents reveal that attacks threaten confidentiality, privacy, and the overall communications ecosystem. This survey aims to detail the core and enabling technologies that form the 5G security model, evaluate related security measures and standards from various standardization bodies, and outline future research directions and open challenges. The paper reviews security monitoring and management practices for 5G networks and highlights key international projects addressing 5G and beyond security concerns.

Abstract

Security has become the primary concern in many telecommunications industries today as risks can have high consequences. Especially, as the core and enable technologies will be associated with 5G network, the confidential information will move at all layers in future wireless systems. Several incidents revealed that the hazard encountered by an infected wireless network, not only affects the security and privacy concerns, but also impedes the complex dynamics of the communications ecosystem. Consequently, the complexity and strength of security attacks have increased in the recent past making the detection or prevention of sabotage a global challenge. From the security and privacy perspectives, this paper presents a comprehensive detail on the core and enabling technologies, which are used to build the 5G security model; network softwarization security, PHY (Physical) layer security and 5G privacy concerns, among others. Additionally, the paper includes discussion on security monitoring and management of 5G networks. This paper also evaluates the related security measures and standards of core 5G technologies by resorting to different standardization bodies and provide a brief overview of 5G standardization security forces. Furthermore, the key projects of international significance, in line with the security concerns of 5G and beyond are also presented. Finally, a future directions and open challenges section has included to encourage future research.