Revolutionizing Risk Management: Breakthrough Research in 5G Infrastructure Security for Autonomous Vehicles

In recent years, a significant shift has occurred in the domain of critical infrastructure. Once characterized by their operational isolation, systems have evolved into complex interconnected networks capable of real-time information exchange and synchronized operations. The telecommunications industry is among the sectors at the heart of this transformation.

Broadscale deployment of 5G telecommunications infrastructure is gathering pace and this emerging cellular technology promises significant increases in bandwidth and network speed, dramatically decreased latency, and the ability to incorporate a vast array of devices. This new capability is already being exploited to enable new applications and radically new operational use cases. One such example is connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) which rely on 5G capabilities to communicate with their environment (other vehicles and transportation infrastructure) to safely navigate autonomously. CAVs transmit and receive huge volumes of data in real time to establish situational awareness and to deliver operational instructions to the vehicle based on that awareness. Disruption or spoofing of these communication signals can have significant and potentially life-threatening consequences.

The Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI) – a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign – has teamed with the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) to develop a methodology for quantitatively assessing the potential impacts of disruption to the 5G telecommunications infrastructure on CAVs and to identify strategies to mitigate those impacts.

The research team, led by Principal Investigator Dr. Iris Tien, adopted a holistic perspective, assessing risks across various components and scenarios, rather than focusing solely on specific 5G vulnerabilities. This approach enabled an in-depth risk assessment. Moreover, the team employed rigorous quantitative methods to turn these identified risks into actionable metrics, allowing stakeholders to systematically evaluate and rank different risk dimensions. While focusing on the CAV use case, the team’s research has revealed some of the broader implications of the vulnerabilities, shedding light on how telecommunications vulnerabilities could create problems that ripple through any network of interconnected systems.

Tien, who is Williams Family Associate Professor at Georgia Tech, said, “Increasing connectivity of critical infrastructure systems is providing increased opportunities for monitoring, operations, and control of critical infrastructure. However, with these increased capabilities comes many new potential risks for these systems.” Her team aimed to go beyond the limitations of existing risk assessments, many of which Tien said, “only provide qualitative assessments of risks or focus solely on the telecommunications systems.” By adopting a comprehensive holistic perspective and introducing novel methodologies to assess and quantify risks associated with 5G, the researchers sought to identify and address vulnerabilities to the 5G infrastructure as well as to systems dependent upon that infrastructure. "With the growing connectivity and automation of critical infrastructure across systems and functions, this work is more important now than ever," said Tien.

In today's interconnected world, minor disruptions in telecommunications can lead to catastrophic failures, ranging from electricity grid disruptions to transportation system breakdowns, and even national security threats. Tien’s research seeks to provide preventative solutions by identifying such potential cascading failures and by formulating recommendations for mitigation strategies to prevent them.

As we brace ourselves for the 5G era, the breakthrough research of Tien and her team at Georgia Tech is providing invaluable insights that are helping CIRI to achieve its mission objective to ensure a resilient and interconnected future for our nation.