Securing Public Safety Communications on Commercial and Tactical 5G Networks: A Survey and Future Research Directions

Abstract

The forthcoming communication networks for public safety authorities rely on the fifth generation (5G) of mobile networking technologies. Police officers, paramedics, border guards, as well as fire and rescue personnel, will connect through commercial operator's access network and rapidly deployable tactical bubbles. This transition from closed and dedicated infrastructure to hybrid architecture will expand the threat surface and expose mission-critical applications and sensitive information to cyber and physical adversaries. We explore and survey security architecture and enablers for prioritized public safety communication in 5G networks. We identify security threat scenarios and analyze enabling vulnerabilities, threat actors, attacks vectors, as well as risk levels. Security enablers are surveyed for tactical access and core networks, commercial infrastructure, and mission-critical applications, starting from push-to-talk and group video communication and leading to situational-awareness and remote-controlled systems. Two solutions are trialed and described in more detail: remote attestation enhanced access control for constrained devices, and securing of satellite backhauls. We also discuss future research directions highlighting the need for enablers to automate security of rapid deployments, for military-grade cost-effective customizations of commercial network services to ensure robustness, and for hardening of various types of public safety equipment.

A network application approach towards 5G and beyond critical communications use cases

“…The RESPOND-A project, on the other hand, has evaluated 5G capabilities and demonstrated the superior connectivity offered by 5G communications technologies in hands-on approach across different search-and-rescue scenarios with real end-users Paladin et al (2023). The FUDGE-5G project (Gomez-Barquero et al, 2021) aims at contributing to the recent evidence surrounding the concept of the 5G "tactical bubble", i.e., ad-hoc, dedicated mobile networks, intended solely for the vertical for which they are deployed (Suomalainen et al, 2021). More recently, newly funded initiatives FIDAL and 6G-SANDBOX announced plans to experiment with the 3GPP Common API Framework, to expose mission-critical services APIs (Charismiadis et al, 2023).…”

Survey on Device to Device (D2D) Communication for 5GB/6G Networks: Concept, Applications, Challenges, and Future Directions

“…Different security models and algorithms were designed to measure the security workload on heterogeneous mobile devices [169]- [171]. Besides that, an in-depth survey on security design aims was introduced in [126], [157], [172]. The survey included authentication, secure routing, key management, physical layer, access control, and additional security issues.…”

New horizons in tactical communications: An overview of emerging technologies possibilities

“…Virtualization can help network security. For this reason, the commercial and tactical security guidelines provided by 5G are analyzed for communications in public environments to validate if the security level of a public 5G network can be extrapolated to military scenarios [2]. 5G will dominate next-generation telecommunications networks and enable new applications, playing a pivotal role in future societies.…”