Nokia has enjoyed mounting success in the burgeoning 5G security field by banging the drum loudly and repeatedly, while profiting from Huawei’s discomfiture in this area.
We should acknowledge the company’ commitment to the field while also noting that its rivals are hardly going to leave it a clear run. Indeed, Ericsson has been beefing up its security activities with its focus on a holistic approach, while Huawei continues to court mindshare with seminars and white papers. Without the kickback against Huawei, following the US sanctions and actions targeted specifically against the Chinese company, which President Biden shows little sign of relaxing, Huawei would still be setting the pace over 5G security technology.
In the event, Nokia has been the most successful in filling the void left by Huawei in those countries where the latter has been excluded from 5G network rollouts to varying degrees. Nor surprisingly therefore, the USA has been particularly fertile ground for Nokia’s security plants, coming to a climax with the company’s selection in January 2021 as a technology provider and collaborator by the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) 5G Cybersecurity Project. Nokia appears to be the sole operator working with NCCoE alongside several unnamed technology vendors, mostly including participants from government and industry.
This has led to further gains, such as recent selection of its NetGuard suite by Dish Network for securing the first US Open RAN-based 5G network. Dish is best known for its satellite TV and more recently Sling TV Internet services, but has entered the broadband field and recruited Nokia to protect 5G network slices for provisioning to emerging enterprise customers.
Securing network slices is critical for all operators if they are to compete with private 5G networks in the enterprise and industrial sectors, where they must be seen to be capable of at least equal resilience against threats of all kinds, from theft of critical data to denial of service.
Dish is deploying NetGuard to underpin the orchestration, automation and response capabilities needed to scale the network with minimal manual intervention, while minimizing cyber incidents and containing their impact when they do occur. This will involve using automated tools, extended analytics, and integrated collaboration processes, according to Nokia, to encourage not just enterprises but also wholesale customers themselves offering commercial services as MVNOs.
As Marc Rouanne, chief network officer at Dish, made clear: “Secure network slicing is a key differentiator of Dish’s 5G network, and as we deliver these capabilities to our customers, we will provide a new level of security for their services. Nokia delivers a suite of security tools needed to help our customers unleash the power of network slicing, giving them the security, speed and control they require for their businesses.”
Coinciding with announcement of the Dish deployment, AdaptiveMobile Security, a specialist in the field, reported finding a serious flaw in the 3GPP architecture for network slicing that it was working with GSMA to fix.
Of course, such vendors have a vested interest in talking up security fears and can exaggerate, or in some cases identify risks that are theoretical and are only ever likely to be exploited by security professionals as opposed to hackers, cyber criminals or state actors. In network slicing, however, it appears there is a genuine vulnerability in the integration between the application and network layers. This is quite fundamental given that the objective is precisely to enable a service operating in a given chunk of spectrum to be subdivided at the network level between multiple application domains, with different qualities of service in some cases.
AdaptiveMobile Security stated that the vulnerabilities meant that protection against extraction of user data, particularly location tracking, was inadequate, while there was potential for denial of service attacks against specific network functions, as well targeting given slicing customers.
The GSMA pointed out none of the attacks have even been demonstrated in live environments but stated that it was working with the company on fixes and would submit those to the 3GPP. Such prompt action was taken in the hope of pre-empting any concerns among potential network slicing customers. Nokia will naturally be following developments and ensuring that fixes are deployed immediately they are available at customers such as Dish.
On the campaigning front, Nokia has been directing its fire on IoT deployments rather than network slicing, with the usual talk of increased attack surfaces and proliferation of vulnerable endpoints incapable of running security. But the vendor needs to be careful not to overegg that pudding by flagging up problems that do not really exist, as in some environmental monitoring deployments where there is no threat to endpoints, or cases where lack of client processing capabilities is actually a strength.
Indeed, as we have made clear before, for Nokia to exploit this window of opportunity in 5G security that has opened wider as a result of Huawei’s plight, it must convince operators that it has a clear and near term plan to migrate to new platforms and address initial teething problems, which were said to be responsible for launch delays in some markets last year.
It may also need to play catch-up with Ericsson as well as Huawei over some key technologies where it appears to be lagging, such as dynamic spectrum sharing. But with the Dish deployment, we must acknowledge Nokia is enjoying some success.