An Approach for End-to-End (E2E) Security of 5G Applications

As 5G transitions from an industrial vision to a tangible, next-generation mobile technology, security remains key business driver. Heterogeneous environment, new networking paradigms and novel use cases makes 5G vulnerable to new security threats. This in turn necessitates a flexible and dependable security mechanism. End-to-End (E2E) data protection provides better security, avoids repeated security operations like encryption/decryption and provides differentiated security based on the services. E2E security deals with authentication, integrity, key management and confidentiality. The attack surface of a 5G system is larger as 5G aims for a heterogeneous networked society. Hence attack resistance needs to be a design consideration when defining new 5G protocols. This framework has been designed for accessing the manifold applications with high security and trust by offering E2E security for various services. The proposed framework is evaluated based on computation complexity, communication complexity, attack resistance rate and security defensive rate. The protocol is also evaluated for correctness, and resistance against passive, active and dictionary attacks using random oracle model and Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool.