Rhys John Miller

The forthcoming 5th generation of mobile networks (5G) makes a revolutionary promise: higher capacity and connectivity at greater speeds. To achieve this goal, 5G will need to use significantly more spectrum and some of these frequencies will be in bands higher than in traditional mobile networks, and therefore 5G will bank on millimetre waves (mmWaves). But, these do not travel well through physical obstacles or at the large distances over which today’s high-power cell towers broadcast their signal. To this end, 5G systems need to employ the so-called small-cells (which in fact now include micro-cells, pico-cells, femto-cells, etc). This amounts to using thousands of low-powered mini base-stations (or remote radio heads), placed significantly closer together than traditional cell towers are; the usage of these cells together to increase coverage is often term as “heterogenous networks” (HetNets).

Thus, we are concerned with a number of security aspects stemming to these two 5G technologies: (a) SC equates to new elements in the mobile architecture and therefore to new vulnerability entry points; moreover, the backend in 5G networks will be virtualised and functions may be moved around within the network, so the actual architecture will be fluid, changeable on-demand and this can open to further, new threats. In a systematic fashion, this project will undertake the formal security & privacy analysis of 5G-systems against 5G-driven security risks including the aforementioned threats stemming from SC.