A Systematic Study for Understanding the Security Risks in 5G Core Network

The widespread adoption of 5G networks has revolutionized communication, providing great connectivity and services across various verticals. Specifically, on the 5G Core (5GC) this has been made possible by leveraging network slicing and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) where multiple Network Functions (NFs) are involved to serve different user requests on the control plane and a variety of service traffic on the data plane. However, as 5G networks embrace zero trust and multi-tenant architectures, this rapid technological advancement has also exposed the 5GC to various security risks such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), Man in The Middle (MITM), cross-slice disruptions, and side-channel attacks. In this regard, this paper presents a comprehensive approach to enhance the security of 5GC through a systematic study of dependency graphs, Betweenness Centrality (BC), and attack graphs. Potential attack scenarios are carefully analyzed by modeling the 3GPP-defined 5GC, performing vulnerability assessments, building attack graphs, analyzing them, and presenting the key inferences from the study.