The Five Focus Areas for 5G Security Innovation and Thought Leadership

5G brings the promise of new revenue opportunities for service providers. Service providers will be able to offer new differentiated services and capabilities, connecting customers to multi-cloud services and applications with specific KPIs.

To help service providers in the delivery of 5G, Cisco’s Cloud-to-Client approach unifies multi-vendor solutions into a single, standards-based architecture and spans across multi-cloud, IP routing, 5G core, service edge, access networks, Internet of Things (IoT), and security.

New revenue opportunities are infinite, so are security threats. Many IoT services will utilize new 5G air interfaces. Networks will be more distributed leading to a surge in entry points for more destructive threats, and new transient or moving threat boundaries.

To prepare service providers for these looming security challenges, Cisco offers a comprehensive security approach for the optimal deployment and consumption of 5G services, revealed in detail in our 5G security innovation with Cisco white paper.

5G Security Risks

5G will increase in wireless capacity by 1,000 times and connect 7 billion people and 7 trillion “things”, estimates a joint initiative between EU Commission and European ICT.

This massive throughput connectivity and capabilities in 5G require a major network architectural change, from radio access to the core. It bridges wireless and wireline networks through an evolving architecture which can involve network slicing, Control and User Plane Separation (CUPS), Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), just to name a few of the changes to the network. As the network changes at the same time, new challenges and threats will come about.

As we move into the 5G era we are also seeing more sophisticated attacks. Gartner believes half of the malware next year will use some encryption to hide malware and organizations today do not have a solution for this.

In my view, 5G’s evolving architectural nature and an expanding threat surface call for an integrated end-to-end approach to cybersecurity. Our security innovations based on visibility (even in encrypted traffic) and control for the entire 5G network, up to all applications, can provide a secure delivery of new cases with service assurance.

Intrinsic Security is Key

In the world of 5G, traditional siloed security and add-on edge appliances have limitations, are complicated and costly. Security today does not interoperate enough with the network and there will be gaps if we follow the same approach with 5G.

Cisco’s security innovation is holistic and intrinsic to the network. Leveraging the network functions themselves for visibility and fast threat identification, segmentation to reduce the attack surface and the impact of an attack; threat protection to stop a breach across multiple points of the network; and support from our threat intelligence Talos team.

5G Security Innovation with Cisco

5G security needs an integrated approach to deal with close to 20 billion threats per day. With visibility and control from end-to-end, Cisco’s full suite of 5G solutions and end-to-end security architecture can help service providers in the Asia-Pacific region stop threats at the edge, protect users wherever they work, control who gets on the network, simplify network segmentation, and find and contain problems fast.