Mitigating Cyber Threats within 5G Cloud Infrastructure

Mitigating Cyber Threats within 5G Cloud Infrastructure

5g communications

This post is also available in: heעברית (Hebrew)

“5G changes the traditional mobile network operations architecture, allowing for the core network to be moved away from proprietary hardware and software to a modular cloud-native infrastructure,” said Jorge Laurel, US National Security Agency (NSA) Project Director. “This is more flexible in its development and deployment, but also introduces new cybersecurity implications and risks that need to be mitigated.”

Now, Pod secuirty in 5G cloud is required, Pods are the isolated environments where 5G network functions are executed. Pods provide highly configurable, flexible workloads that can be scaled and orchestrated from a central control plane while enforcing isolation of each workload. The requirements of 5G cloud components makes securely configuring Pods a challenging but important ongoing effort. 

The NSA and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published guidance to mitigate cyber threats within 5G cloud infrastructure. 

The guidance is part of the Enduring Security Framework (ESF) effort.

The guidance provides several aspects of pod security, including limiting permissions on deployed containers, denial of service attacks, implementing real-time threat detection and more.

Best practices are discussed on preventing and detecting malicious cyber actor activity in a 5G cloud infrastructure and recommended mitigations to prevent cybersecurity incidents. The gudiance focuses on Pod security and preventing a process that runs in a container from escaping the isolation boundaries of its container and gaining access to the underlying host, according to securitymagazine.com.

Watch INNOTECH panel discussion on 5G opportunities and challenges at INNOTECH 2021: