Luxembourg research project to address 5G privacy and security issues

29 June 2021

Towards secured 5G vehicular networks.

As the amount of 5G implementations increase, the need for security will become even more critical. Research project 5G-INSIGHT conducted by the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technolgy (LIST) aims to provide advanced security mechanisms to detect and mitigate slicing attacks for 5G and beyond vehicular networks with special focus on the France-Luxembourg cross-border area.

5G is emerging and is to serve as a platform to support networking connections for sensors and vehicles on roads and provide vehicle-to-everything services, in particular. These advances for tomorrow’s connected mobility are highly dependent on the deployment of 5G technologies along with new service-oriented architectures enable through network slicing. Yet, the 5G infrastructure is still limited in Luxembourg and France. Indeed, most of it relies on a non-standalone architecture, which means that a large part of the network is still based on 4G.

Detecting and mitigating threats

With 5G comes new service-oriented architectures, made possible by so-called “network slicing”. This allows multiple virtualised networks to be created on a physical 5G infrastructure, each of which responds to a specific use case and therefore has its own capabilities.

The benefit is to provide a more personalised network service that adapts to the needs of connected applications, which may have different latency, throughput, scalability or even network resource allocation needs. While the deployment and adoption of such technologies is not fully deployed, many questions and challenges are emerging regarding data security and privacy.

There are indeed still many gaps in this area. Recent advances in data-driven network planning, design and security have the potential to provide new solutions.

“5G is being deployed everywhere, but there are still many aspects that still need to be developed, and of course when you develop new functionalities and technologies, security and privacy insurance needs to develop too.”

Sébastien Faye

Research project 5G-INSIGHT looks at the specific use of vehicle-to-everything communications, and securing them when 5G is used to communicate. This implies complex and distributed network architectures, on top of which virtual networks can be implemented.

LIST researchers will generate realistic datasets on vehicular-slicing attacks to develop reliable prediction models. The research group will use its expertise to provide privacy-preserving defence and mitigation mechanisms based on the blockchain and deception security model.

Research project 5G-INSIGHT

5G-INSIGHT will not only contribute to the current state of the art on cross-border 5G vehicular networks and network slicing, but also to the creation of synergies with other national, European, and cross-border 5G projects.

The platform will also be linked as much as possible with other ongoing 5G initiatives. The idea is to create a seamless picture on network planning solutions – considering here the security and privacy aspects. Finally, the development of a proof of concept will demonstrate the ability of 5G-INSIGHT solutions to alleviate security threats, network vulnerabilities and attack risks in a virtualised cross-border environment.

5G-INSIGHT is a cross-border project, jointly funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) and the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR). The three-year project involves five different partners, including three universities in France, and two entities in Luxembourg, namely the University of Luxembourg and LIST.

Excerpts from ENSURING 5G SECURITY FOR CROSS-BORDER VEHICLES

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