5G World Wrap Up

After 18 months and 8 days, I finally walked into an in-person telecoms event on Tuesday. The unfamiliar request for Covid Vaccination Certificates soon gave way to the familiar hubbub of how'do'you'dos!

5G World Security Day.

Opening the day on behalf of the Event’s lead sponsor, Jeremy Thompson urged authorities everywhere to make well-grounded security assessments, based upon qualified quantifiable data rather than feelings.

The following Securing the Future Networks Panel discussion discussed the key themes and trends for the coming years. UK5G Security Advisor Stephen Douglas addressed the opportunities to manage security in the supply chain and envisaged both the use of Digital Twins to isolate security vulnerabilities but also the use of ‘Digital Honeypots’ to capture attackers. There was a perception that testing in the live network would have to be the norm within 2-3 years, with limited short-term notification being given to customer stakeholders for mitigation purposes in case of any negative reactions.?

Huawei Telecom Security Expert Yair Kler expressed that security orchestration and access management are becoming increasingly important. Notwithstanding?use of secured devices, he foresaw use of context-driven AI and monitoring of user access to be important trends. So while a surgeon may be allowed to operate over 5G from the beach, Sys-admin access from atypical locations should be regarded as a potential attempted breach.

Alex Leadbeater from BT, and Patricia Diez Munoz?from Telefonica felt that both AI and IT security experts needed to hear from experts from the first 5Gs before retirement took their insights away, since Telco-specific vulnerabilities. Yair added that the roaming interface was the most frequently attacked interface.

A highlight of the session was Ian Levy’s NCSC Address. With typical candour Ian opened with the provocation that “Telecoms Security is Broken” and that ‘nutters like me’ have to fix it.

Perhaps referring to a major OEM’s 2020 comments he asserted “Virtualisation does not increase the security risk, it’s how the internet works!”

Reassuring that many elements of IT best practise would carry over to Telco, Ian then outlined where divergence may be seen, namely that traditional TELNET still lingering amongst many accesses into?the management plane was emblematic of one of the weakest links.

The second weak link / delta from well proven IT security is ‘Standardisation’. Ian gave eCPRI standard as an example, citing 74 instances of ‘vendor-specific’ options in a 109 page document. He contrasted this with ‘real interoperability is how the internet works’. Alluding to Nokia’s recent struggles with the impact of geo-politics he suggested that the O-RAN Alliance needs to work on it’s openness.

Finally – without explicitly referencing NCSC role in drafting the many TSR requirements in upcoming Telecoms (Security) Bill 2021 – he expressed that cycling through the UK Telecommunications Laboratory would be the entry ticket to new vendors into the MNO networks, as vendors had their security capabilities validated in a gating environment prior to MNO evaluation.

J-F Rubon of Thales took us through an interesting ‘Connect, Protect, Predict’ framework using analytics and AI to enhance detection and mitigation.

Conference Days

Wednesday was the first exhibition day and the pace significantly stepped up with several hundred delegates filling the presentation, demo and coffee areas. Inevitably, pent up demand for in-person dialogue overcame the desire to attend one of up to 3 parallel presentations, so it was not possible to attend all in-person.

A particularly-well attended session was the Panel Discussion on the changes driven by Edge Computing. While Paul Miller, Yves Bellego and Terje Jensen presented great insights into the forward strides which they are making?in maturing their Wind River, Orange and Telenor solutions, undoubtably Mansoor Hanif took use case bragging rights, requiring Edge to support 100,000 Humanoid robots in NEOM by 2030.

Mansoor inadvertently upped the ante from WWT’s own Daniel Valle who asked ‘Where’s my Robot Butler’ in challenging when some prior 5G promises might finally be delivered.

With face-to-face relationships starved for 18 months, it’s no surprise that the day flew by in a rolling melee of questions and bonhomie.

Unsurprisingly the final f2f day lacked some of the energy of the previous day. Though crowds were down, a significant number packed into the keynote track to hear Andrea Dona outline Vodafone's Transformation at the Intersection of 5G, Cloud and IoT from Telco to Techco.?

This echoed a theme for the day as many speakers linked into the evolution of well-proven IT techniques into the Telco Space.

There is no doubt that the organisers were left little choice but to hedge their bets on a Hybrid Virtual/In-person event, and while this facilitated several panelists and speakers to circumvent travel restrictions, it no doubt blunted the in-person attendance. It cannot be stressed enough the benefits of seeing a knowledgeable face in the morning, sparking a question over lunch, and being able to seize a chance meeting in the afternoon to answer a seemingly minor but critical connection.

I will leave you with a view that while many of us were not ‘match fit’ we have certainly boosted our fitness for the widespread return of more industry and networking events to come!??