LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE 360 SERIES – PRIVACY & SECURITY: IoT is not possible without end-to-end security, and 5G can provide solutions to improve this, said Bodil Josefsson, head of IoT security at Ericsson.

5G will provide a key component, trust, because of its unique features such as resilience, network slicing, service-based architecture, communication security and identity management, Josefsson said during day two’s opening keynote, titled Safeguarding the Network.

On the last point she explained that 5G will enable authentication methods in addition to the SIM, such as certificates and tokens, plus the ability for a variety of credentials to be used as identification, which can address the constraints that come with IoT.

These include small devices which have limited power and memory, and which are unable to take on the burden of hefty security solutions.

Network slicing, a very important concept in 5G, will allow for the separation of traffic based on how sensitive it is, while service-based architectures will enable traffic to be moved in an agile way through cloud technology, Josefsson said.

5G will also bring communications security – better ways of detecting eavesdropping and modifications in the traffic. It will also mean there can be integral protection on the user plane rather than at the application layer.

Josefsson stated trust cannot be added on top of an untrusted solution. IoT requires hardware, software, deployment and partners to be trustworthy right from the very start, in order to provide a trusted business model.

To explain the challenges around IoT security she said that as more and more critical infrastructure is being connected, the 2015 cyberattack on the power grid in Ukraine was just the beginning, and there are certain to be more such incidents, for instance targeting chemical plants and water dams.