Securing 5G URLLC

Abstract

Fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks are networks that implement the 5G telecommunication standard. 5G networks feature a service called Ultra Reliable Low- Latency Communication (URLLC), which requires messages to arrive in under 1 millisecond. Resource-constrained devices may not be able to implement common security algorithms suggested for URLLC and will have to communicate insecurely. As it stands, the integrity of URLLC is most often achieved with a Cyclic Redundancy Check, which is malleable and can be generated for any arbitrary message by an adversary. In this thesis, a number of established security algorithms are benchmarked and evaluated for use in URLLC. Results show that Ascon and ChaCha20- Poly1305 are viable authenticated encryption algorithms, SipHash-2-4 is a viable integrity algorithm, and AES-GCM can be used for authenticated encryption only if hardware acceleration is available. The algorithms were tested against one set of standard encryption and integrity algorithms from fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks.