Is Today's End-to-End Communication Security Enough for 5G and Its Beyond?

Abstract

Mobile and wireless communication continues its rapid development. Beyond 5G, heterogeneous networks (HetNets) will be merged with the integration of various networking technologies. Unique characteristics of such an integrated converged network cause new security challenges, such as difficulty of key agreement and theft of communication content, especially when crossing network domains happens. In order to ensure secure and reliable communications, end-to-end (E2E) communication security is highly expected, especially for cross-trust-domain communications in HetNets. Unfortunately, little existing research touches this issue and the literature lacks a deep-insight review on the current state-of-the-art. In this article, we summarize current E2E secure communication scenarios and basic techniques. We propose a number of requirements based on security threat analysis and employ them as a measure to evaluate existing works. Through review and analysis, we finally determine open issues to highlight future research directions.