A great deal has been written about the security issues, national security and defense implications, and similar matters related to 5G wireless networks in the last year or so, partially driven by the issues around proposed bans of Huawei by the Trump administration in the US and other national governments. I’ve been following these discussions, which are particularly confusing and complicated given the commercial hype surrounding 5G deployment and rollout, and the somewhat fluid definition of what actually constitutes 5G architecture (consider, for example, the discussions about edge processing). The flood of publications have been of extremely varied and uneven quality, and I’ve found many to be quite frustrating for various reasons. I’ve seen several presentations on aspects of 5G networking sponsored by the US National Academies over the past year or so; I’ve found these to be quite good and if you are interested in the topic, they are certainly worth reading.
Recently the University of California, Berkeley Center for Long Term Cybersecurity (CLTC), which has done some really excellent and unique work in recent years, issued a concise and very useful report titled ‘Security Implications of 5G Networks”, which is a valuable addition to the discussions on this topic. You can find a brief summary and a link to download the report at:
https://cltc.berkeley.edu/2020/09/22/cltc-report-security-implications-of-5g-networks/
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
