Assessing Security in the Multi-Stakeholder Premise of 5G: A Survey and an Adapted Security Metrics Approach
Muhammad Shafayat Oshman · 2022
The fifth-generation (5G) mobile telecom network has been a focal point of research amongst the community in recent times.Features and characteristics like dynamicity (which enables the dynamic allocation of resources to stakeholders on a need basis), low latency, higher network capabilities etc., makes 5G attractive to telecom operators.But as is the case with any new technology, new threats have emerged and made their way into the ecosystem.Therefore, we have a need to evaluate these threats and evaluate the state of security of 5G deployments.Security metrics provide a pathway to quantitatively measure the security posture of an environment by taking these new threats into account.Existing literature contains a plethora of security metrics proposals designed for different system setups.We need to analyze if and how existing security metrics can be applied to a 5G environment.As such, this thesis aims to do a state-of-the-art survey to explore the diverse set of security metrics in literature, understand the process of deriving security metrics.We then employ this knowledge to investigate the factors that hinder the usage of existing security metrics in a 5G environment, identify solutions from existing academic proposals on how to address those factors, propose an adapted security metrics approach to address the multi-ownership nature of 5G and discuss the design and analysis of Argus-5, a tool designed to verify the feasibility of the adapted security metrics approach and simulate various scenarios.Dr. AbdelRahman Abdou for their feedback and suggestions during the oral examination, which helped me to further strengthen the quality of my thesis and Dr.