An arm of the Department of Commerce on Wednesday began an outreach effort to industry aimed at building cyber security into the emerging fifth-generation wireless architecture, which is seen as a critical enabler to a slew of new products and capabilities for the global economy.
Under the new “5G Cybersecurity: Preparing a Secure Evolution to 5G” project, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is seeking products and expertise from organizations to “support and demonstrate security platforms” to address cyber security challenges with the new architecture.
A 5G world will feature higher data rates, reduced latency and more capacity, all of which are expected to usher in a greatly expanded Internet of Things, greater use of unmanned systems, and more, and at the same time create a larger surface area for cyber-attacks.
The new effort will be managed by the NIST National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence.
The demonstrations will be defined through a “Building Block” project, which “will demonstrate how the components of the 5G architecture can provide security capabilities to mitigate identified risks and meet industry sectors’ compliance requirements,” NIST said in a May 20 notice in the Federal Register. “The proposed proof-of-concept solution will integrate commercial and open source products that leverage cybersecurity standards and recommended practices to demonstrate the use case scenarios and showcase 5G’s robust security features.”
NIST said that the demonstrations will result in a cyber security practice guide for implementation.
The notice includes a link to the 23-page Building Block Objective, which said the project will be flexible, iterative and phased “to take advantage of newly introduced security capabilities.” The demonstrations will include use case scenarios of how 5G components can provide security to mitigate risks and meet industry compliance requirements, it said.
The dates for the demonstrations haven’t been announced yet.