Future of Cybersecurity with 5G: Ashis Guha, CEO, RAH Infotech

A recent report by  Ponemon Institute has found  that 97% of companies believe that with 5G, IoT devices could wreak havoc on their organisations. The large scale cyber-attacks using enterprise IoT devices have become pretty much common and a few have been accomplished for their network protection

5G mobile communication is on the horizon and its expansion comes with promises of blazing speed and performance with remarkably low latency. Just as 4G networks led to the ubiquity of the smartphones, 5G is slated to spur massive deployments of emerging technologies such as IoT, ML and AI, facilitating use cases across almost all industry verticals.

Gartner’s research forecasts that 20.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide by 2020 and another study by Business Insider Intelligence predicts that the IoT market will grow over $3 trillion annually by 2026.

Although the mass rollout of 5G is expected to be around 2020, the race to be the ‘First’ has already begun in the enterprise space. While the arrival of 5G networks is bringing in an array of opportunities, it is also bringing in cybersecurity challenges for service providers and customers alike. A recent report by Ponemon Institute has found that 97% of companies believe IoT devices could wreak havoc on their organisations. The large scale cyber-attacks using enterprise IoT devices have become pretty much common and a few have been accomplished for their network protection. Each one of the IoT devices connected to enterprise networks becomes a potential security loophole and hence organisations will have to change or restructure their cybersecurity strategies to deal with the new platform. So keeping cybersecurity in mind organisations need to be prepared and should already have plans in place to upgrade and strengthen their existing security solutions.

Security Challenges

The 5G network’s expansion of bandwidth and billions of internet connected devices will create a vast attack surface and high chances of intensive attacks by cybercriminals using the weak links within the security chain. The new age networks, for example, will be moved away from legacy infrastructures to newer and cost-effective IT technologies such as Virtualisation, Software Defined Network (SDN)/Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV). The security of function network elements in legacy networks used depends on how well the physical entities could be separated from each other. In 5G networks that are mainly on cloud-based infrastructure, functions in a different way. The security is pushed outward to interconnected digital routers throughout the network, thereby encouraging the industry to put more focus on the security of 5G infrastructures.

Building a Robust Service-Oriented Security

1. Differentiated Security Mechanisms: Remote services that healthcare organizations offers, demands robust security. The light security solutions that suit the requirements of IoT environments by nature aren’t suitable for this. Hence a security solution that would not only reduce dependence on individual link security but would also streamline security management can be of great help in such scenarios.

2. Use Security as a Service: Networks may choose to validate service access and send back the authorisation result to vertical industries by choosing network as security. With Security as service, the networks only have to pay a fee to the service provider for the utilization of specific protection services in cloud platforms or virtual network slice, thus lowering the cost of implementation compared to traditional security solutions.

3. Sorting Virtual Network Slices: To protect and prevent confidential information being accessed by users in other slices, it is important for networks to separate virtual network slices.

4. Safeguarding User Privacy: Given the vast opportunities, many organizations from different industries will be adopting 5G very soon. Hence, guarding information security and user privacy becomes essential to the success of 5G networks. To combat the potentially catastrophic security issue posed by 5G, businesses must enforce strict security policies that should define how networks should use privacy information and how it should handle that information after using it to protect user data.

5. Automation is a must: In the end, IoT and 5G security will come down to being a game of probability, however, automation and AI stacks the odds heavily in favor of internet service providers (ISP). With 5G on the horizon, ISPs should proactively plan to protect their networks against evolving security threats by turning to machine learning and AI-enabled solutions. At the cusp of digital transformation, India is still far from realizing the benefits of 5G. However, the momentum and investments made by every player in the industry and government at all levels are truly massive. As we inch ever closer to the launch of 5G, we will see the acceleration.

Ashis Guha is CEO, RAH Infotech