5G Security Vulnerabilities Concern Mobile Operators

As 5G private networks become more widely available in the next years, security may become a major concern for businesses. According to a report presented at the Mobile World Congress on Monday, significant gaps in mobile operators’ security capabilities still prevail. 

According to the GSMA and Trend Micro report, 68 percent of carriers already sell private wireless networks to enterprise customers, with the rest expecting to do so by 2025. However, these may not be ready for prime time in terms of security: For example, 41% of surveyed operators claimed they are having difficulty addressing vulnerabilities connected to 5G network virtualization. 

In addition, 48% of them indicated they don’t have adequate internal knowledge or resources to find and fix security flaws at all. For 39 percent of surveyed operators, a restricted pool of mobile-network security professionals is a contributing cause to the problem. 

As 5G networks are essentially software-defined and virtualized, they are a significant change from previous wireless networks. In 5G, network operations that were previously defined in hardware are transformed into virtual software capabilities that are orchestrated by a flexible software control plane. In 5G, even the radio access network (RAN) air interfaces are software-defined. The concern is that this opens the door for a slew of new exploitable flaws to appear throughout the architecture, in places where they have never been exposed before. 

5G Security Vulnerabilities Concern Mobile Operators