The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) said today they published new guidance to mitigate cyber threats within 5G cloud infrastructure.
The new guidance – Security Guidance for 5G Cloud Infrastructures: Securely Isolate Network Resources (Part II) – is the second in a series of 5G cloud security guidance documents issued under the Enduring Security Framework, which is a public-privacy, cross-sector working group led by CISA and NSA.
The first portion of the 5G cloud security guidance covered best practices for preventing and detecting malicious cyber actor activity in a 5G cloud infrastructure, while the new guidance deals with threats to 5G container-centric or hybrid container/virtual networks, also known as pods, CISA said.
“The guidance provides several aspects of pod security including limiting permissions on deployed containers, avoiding resource contention and denial of service attacks, and implementing real-time threat detection,” the agency said.
“The deployment of 5G is built on an agile, highly configurable network architecture, a foundation of virtualization that can bring a wealth of benefits to our lives and work as well as greater security risks,” commented Matt Hartman, Deputy Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity at CISA. “With our partners at NSA and ESF, CISA encourages the 5G community to review this guidance to ensure they achieve the necessary heightened level of Pod security in 5G cloud.”
Jorge Laurel, NSA Project Director for the Enduring Security Framework, said, “5G changes the traditional mobile network operations architecture, allowing for the core network to be moved away from proprietary hardware and software to a modular cloud-native infrastructure.” He continued, “this is more flexible in its development and deployment, but also introduces new cybersecurity implications and risks that need to be mitigated.”
“5G changes communication capabilities and risks,” added Rob Joyce, NSA Cybersecurity Director. “This guidance document from ESF brings to light the need to secure Pods as an important aspect of securing 5G cloud environments.”
