Abstract

The advanced features of 5G mobile wireless network systems yield new security requirements and challenges. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the security of 5G wireless network systems compared with the traditional cellular networks. The paper starts with a review on 5G wireless networks particularities as well as on the new requirements and motivations of 5G wireless security. The potential attacks and security services are summarized with the consideration of new service requirements and new use cases in 5G wireless networks. The recent development and the existing schemes for the 5G wireless security are presented based on the corresponding security services, including authentication, availability, data confidentiality, key management, and privacy. This paper further discusses the new security features involving different technologies applied to 5G, such as heterogeneous networks, device-to-device communications, massive multiple-input multiple-output, software-defined networks, and Internet of Things. Motivated by these security research and development activities, we propose a new 5G wireless security architecture, based on which the analysis of identity management and flexible authentication is provided. As a case study, we explore a handover procedure as well as a signaling load scheme to show the advantages of the proposed security architecture. The challenges and future directions of 5G wireless security are finally summarized.