The nightmare on 5G street – IoT is coming and we don’t know how to secure it
Telecoms.com periodically invites third parties to share their views on the industry’s most pressing issues. In this piece Charl van der Walt, Chief Security Strategy Officer at SecureData looks at some of the security implications that come with the advent of the 5G/IoT era.
There is no doubt that 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) will revolutionise the ease with which life is lived, business is conducted, manual tasks are performed, and data is analysed. For industry, these innovations will provide a great leap towards quicker and more profitable business, and for the most part, that is a good thing. What is worrying, however, is that IoT security is already developing an unsavoury reputation for being terrible. 5G is likely to be a huge enabler of all kinds of IoT, which will only exacerbate this issue.
Once 5G becomes the standard network we all use, the likely result is that we will all be connected, at all times, wherever we are, and at ridiculous speeds. Given our dismal track record with security for ‘traditional; IT, this is a big challenge, and if left unaddressed, is going to be a lot of headaches at all levels of industry and society. The political, physical, and technical ramifications of 5G and IoT adoption will need to remain front of mind as businesses prepare for the 4 Industrial Revolution.
What are the risks for industries looking to adopt 5G?
The harsh reality is that consumers and industry alike have become obsessed with connecting things to the internet that we never really needed to before. Fridges, cars, pacemakers – you name it, and it’s probably already connected to the web. But we forget that every time we add anything to the internet, there are inherent security risks that aren’t considered, and therefore cannot be completely controlled. With 5G on the horizon, this always-on obsession of ours is going to become a BIG problem in terms of our own security. In short, where the opportunity for innovation exists, we also expose ourselves to cyber risk.
And it might actually be as bad as it seems. Against this backdrop, the US government is considering deprecating the widespread amount of Internet-connected Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems (SCADA) used by companies in telecommunications, water and waste control, energy, transportation – the list goes on. So high is the risk of connected technologies, that the US government is promoting deployments of “analog and non-digital control systems”. Unfortunately, the risk is already there, with reports of the very real hacking of control systems within the US national grid.
What about those risks at policy level?
Along with the technical risk of IoT systems, we need to consider the role that 5G itself will play as the main infrastructure for IoT and 4 Industrial Revolution (4IR) economies that we are building. The control of 5G, and therefore the power over it, gives countries and companies that are building and maintaining these networks a big head-start over those that aren’t. This power-struggle is already being played out on the global stage with the antagonism we are seeing between the US and Huawei.
