There are three technological certainties in the next twelve to twenty-four months that your business must prepare for; fifth-generation wireless (5G) is coming; it will significantly change the entire cyber landscape, it will impact your network security. This blog is the first in a four-part series that examines the impending 5G transformation and how to secure your business NOW for the new cyber landscape.
Part One: The Potential and Perils of Fifth Generation Wireless (5G)
“I like to refer to 5G as the ‘special generation,’ because it shouldn’t be compared with 4G or 3G, which were designed and deployed mainly for mobile. 5G will transform our lives. We will control our homes, our cars, everything from a single device, and productivity will increase as industry becomes increasingly automated.” – Professor Rahim Tafazolli, Director, 5G Innovation Centre, University of Surrey
5G is the next mobile technology standard, based on the IEEE 802.11ac wireless networking standard, that will succeed the current 4G/LTE technology. It is expected to come to market in 2020. According to Statista, “by 2021, the number of 5G connections is forecast to reach a figure of between 20 million and 100 million. Some estimates put the number at 200 million. Spending on 5G mobile infrastructure for that same year is forecast to be at around 2.3 billion U.S. dollars.” By 2025, Statista predicts the number of worldwide 5G subscriptions will reach 2.61 billion.
The transformative potential of 5G comes down to two words: speed and latency. 5G is anticipated to be up to 100 times faster than current networks. To put that speed in perspective, a two-hour movie could download in under four seconds. That speed will possibly eliminate the latency between instructing a computer to perform a command and its execution. The World Economic Forum estimates that 5G will pump $12 trillion into the global economy by 2035 and usher in a fourth industrial revolution.
Where will 5G take us?
“The fifth generation of cellular networks, 5G, will deliver wireless connections up to 100 times faster than 4G can support. Put another way, that’s the difference between an ordinary adult running and an F-22 fighter jet at top speed.” – David Masson, Canada Country Manager, Darktrace
Imagine a world wherein, not just people, but all things are connected: cars to the roads they drive on; doctors to the personal medical devices of their patients; augmented reality available to help people learn, shop, and explore. This requires a colossal upsurge in the level of connectivity. 5G will make this level of connectivity a reality, allowing for billions of new connections, and making those connections instantaneous. Every industry will be impacted – automotive, healthcare, manufacturing, emergency services, retail, and financial services, to name a few. 5G is deliberately designed so that industries can take advantage of cellular connectivity in ways that wouldn’t have been possible 20-years before, and to scale upwards as use of 5G expands.
Emerging technologies will all see new uses with 5G such as the Internet of Things (IoT), extended reality, and blockchain, which will create new value for businesses. As Asha Keddy, Intel’s Vice President and General Manager, Next Generation and Standards states, “5G will form our communications infrastructure in the same way that roads and power grids formed our industrial infrastructure.” 5G’s ability to reduce delays from seconds to milliseconds will be integral to utilizing life-saving technologies that can’t afford any lag (for example, autonomous vehicles and remote surgery robots). Extensive smart city networks all sharing data in real-time will be enabled by 5G, unifying surveillance cameras, traffic sensors, electricity meters and other IoT devices.
According to Statista, 74 percent of telecom operator CEOs and other industry stakeholder respondents believe that enhanced mobile broadband will be the highest priority use case in early 5G deployment, followed by massive IoT.
5G creates a threat landscape different from previous networks.
“5G is not just for refrigerators. It’s farm implements, it’s airplanes, it’s all kinds of different things that can actually kill people or that allow someone to reach into the network and direct those things to do what they want them to do. It’s a completely different threat that we’ve never experienced before.” – Robert Spalding, Senior Director for Strategic Planning, National Security Council
The very attributes that make 5G an improvement – its ability to support an enormous number of connected devices and enable a massive increase of bandwidth – are also the attributes that create security challenges. Cybersecurity specialists around the world have sounded alarms over the upcoming 5G rollout.
As The New Yorker reported, “even before the introduction of 5G networks, hackers have breached the control center of a municipal dam system, stopped an Internet-connected car as it travelled down an interstate, and sabotaged home appliances. Ransomware, malware, crypto-jacking, identity theft, and data breaches have become so common that more Americans are afraid of cybercrime than they are of becoming a victim of violent crime. Adding more devices to the online universe is destined to create more opportunities for disruption.”
Since 5G enables IoT to be much larger than on the previous LTE network, IoT is a significant cause for security concerns. With 5G advances, IoT install base is expected to explode. According to Statista, as of 2019, there are approximately 26.6 billion connected IoT devices. Statista predicts that by 2025, that number will reach over 75 billion. No one can say what precisely these billions of new IoT devices will be, but with the continued competitive rush to innovate and decrease time-to-market, IoT device security has been lax. This makes IoT devices highly susceptible to exploitation by cyber threat actors.
5G networks will explode vertical industries, empowering the creation of a wide array of new products and services — all of which will demand new, varying levels of cybersecurity. For example, look at automated vehicles, where the number of cyber attacks will rise as autonomous vehicles become more prevalent. To combat this, the safety administration powers governing driver-assisted technologies are employing multi-layered approaches to cybersecurity.
In healthcare, 5G will mean the faster transfer of large patient files, remote patient monitoring and even remote surgery. However, those advances will require more robust cybersecurity to protect against threats such as medical identity theft, medical data breaches, and the remote control of medical IoT devices by threat actors. According to Digital Guardian, breached healthcare records tripled in 2018 – increased IoT device usage across the healthcare industry will only amplify the risks to cybersecurity.
Innovative cloud virtualization technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) are flourishing in anticipation of 5G. However, because of their open, flexible, programmable nature, SDN and NFV are vulnerable to cybersecurity threats. To illustrate, a network element of an SDN, like the management interfaces, could be used to attack the SDN controller and bring down the system.
The 5G standard promises a multitude of benefits, but it will also come with risks. Infinitely more connected devices and elevated use of virtualization and the cloud will mean many more 5G cybersecurity threats and a multifaceted cyber attack surface. At ISA, we know cybersecurity. Our security specialists can help you assess, plan, and remediate now so that you’re ready for the 5G transformation.
transformation.