Security Considerations to Enable Time-Sensitive Networking Over 5G

The evolution of 5G is set to bring about radical deployments in new sectors and novel use cases in the industrial, automotive, and retail segments. Moreover, the guarantee of providing ultra-high reliability and low latencies across the 5G bearer starting from 3GPP Release 16 along with the support of the Ethernet Protocol Data Unit (PDU), opens a plethora of time-sensitive networking applications enabled until now only over wired connections to over 5G. This progression also brings about challenges to end-to-end security for user data and for addressing safety risks due to hazards resulting from functional insufficiencies or foreseeable misuse by persons or rogue devices. In this paper, on one hand, we provide an overview of 5G architecture - take a deep dive into its built-in security mechanisms, and the User Plane Function, and on the other hand, we introduce principles of time-sensitive networking (TSN). We then bring about the correlation of the time-sensitive networking over wired (Ethernet) and wireless (5G) topology and draw the focus on the TSN-related assets and their corresponding possible vulnerabilities in the system and finally, propose approaches to address them.