BigMac: Performance Overhead of User Plane Integrity Protection in 5G Networks
Thijs Heijligenberg, Guido Knips, Christian Böhm, David Rupprecht, Katharina Siobhan Kohls · 2023
5G introduces a series of new security features that overcome known issues of the previous mobile generations. One of these features is integrity protection for user plane data. While this addition protects against manipulations like DNS spoofing, it also introduces extra overhead to user plane traffic. As it is optional to enable, this additional overhead can be the decision point for network operators to avoid the additional security feature. In this work, we investigate the overhead induced by different integrity protection algorithms and test the burden they add to the workload of a device. Our results indicate how visible performance differences would be on the end-devices of users, and how the performance of the algorithms differs in isolation. With these results we aim to initiate a discussion regarding the benefits of enabling user plane integrity protection and to overcome misconceptions regarding the performance impairments for end users.