Guidelines for 5G End to End Architecture and Security Issues

Abstract

Hackers target their attacks on the most vulnerable parts of a system. A system is therefore only as strong as its weakest part, similar to the Cannikin Law, which states that the capacity of a barrel of water depends on the height of the shortest rather than the longest piece of wood. To ensure the security of 5G networks, we first need to understand the overall 5G architecture and examine the potential threats instead of merely setting up a firewall. However, 5G networks will have tremendous coverage. The development of 5G techniques require extensive resources, leading to intense competition between countries attempting to develop 5G networks. Many outstanding papers discuss the techniques for developing specific aspects of the 5G architecture, but to the best of our knowledge, few provide an overview of a complete 5G network. This presents us with a difficult situation because we need to consider the overall architecture to ensure the security of 5G networks. To address that problem, in this paper we provide essential guidelines for understanding the architecture of 5G. We introduce 5G scenarios, outline the network architecture, and highlight the potential security issues for the various components of a 5G network. This paper is intended to facilitate a preliminary understanding of the 5G architecture and the possible security concerns of the various components. The end to end (E2E) 5G network architecture is composed of a next-generation radio access network (NG-RAN), multi-access edge computing (MEC), virtual evolved packet core (vEPC), a data network (DN) and a cloud service. Network slicing (NS), network function virtualization (NFV), NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) and software-defined networking (SDN) are also important techniques for achieving 5G network architectures.