Post-Quantum Cryptography and 5G Security: Tutorial

Published

May 15, 2019

Author(s)

T. Charles Clancy, Robert W. McGwier, Lidong Chen

Abstract

The Fifth Generation (5G) mobile broadband standards make a fundamental shift in cryptography. Prior generations based their security and privacy principally on symmetric key cryptography. The Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) and its successors contain a shared key used to authenticate the User Equipment (UE) to the network, and vice versa. However 5G is shifting its core network over to a microservices, cloud-first architecture and is heavily leveraging protocols like TLS andOAuth2.0 to authenticate and authorize transactions. As a result, it is shifting to a PKI-based trust model. This shift is happening just as quantum computing threatens to unravel the security of traditional ciphers such as RSA and ECC. In this paper we highlight the need to advance the 3GPP 5G standards and NIST post-quantum cryptography standards in tandem, with the goal of launching a "quantum ready" 5G core network.

Proceedings Title

Proceedings of ACM WiSec

Conference Dates

May 15-17, 2019

Conference Location

Miami, FL, US

Conference Title

ACM WiSec

Pub Type

Conferences

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1145/3317549.3324882

Local Download

Keywords

5G, cellular networks, post-quantum cryptography

Citation

Clancy, T. , McGwier, R. and Chen, L. (2019), Post-Quantum Cryptography and 5G Security: Tutorial, Proceedings of ACM WiSec, Miami, FL, US, [online], https://doi.org/10.1145/3317549.3324882, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=927805 (Accessed October 21, 2025)