The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday released a strategy aimed at strengthening the security and resilience of the nation's emerging fifth-generation wireless infrastructure that aligns with a national strategy put out by the White House in the spring.
The CISA 5G Strategy: Ensuring the Security and Resilience of 5G Infrastructure in Our Nation, puts forth five strategic initiatives, accompanied by related objectives, built around securing 5G networks.
The first initiative is to support 5G policy and standards development by emphasizing security and resilience, and includes objectives such an enhancing participation with standards bodies and working groups.
The second initiative is aimed at improving awareness of 5G supply chain risks by partnering with various entities focused on this area to "unify efforts and workstreams" and develop a common framework to assess and communicate risks.
For the third initiative, CISA will work the national laboratories, academia, federal and international partners to identify and communicate risks on legacy networks that 5G will initially rely on in order to strengthen security and reduce vulnerabilities.
Strategic Initiative 4, drawn from potential threats inherent in non-trusted vendors such as China's Huawei, is aimed at fostering trusted 5G vendors through support of research and development efforts and other initiatives to stimulate innovation by trusted companies. The initiative also calls for CISA to continue to analyze and report on the long-terms security risks posed by untrusted vendors.
The final initiative is focused on potential 5G use cases such the Internet of Things and communicating related know vulnerabilities and risk management strategies.
"At CISA, we are committed to working with our partners and stakeholders to ensure the security and integrity of 5G technology in our nation," CISA Director Christopher Krebs says in the introduction to the new strategy. "As we all know, adversaries are not going to stop looking for ways to attack targets of opportunity, especially those that are critically paramount to the long-term success of our nation."
The introduction of 5G networks, which enable faster data transmission speeds in just about real-time, is expected to spawn the broader development of the Internet of Things where aircraft, automobiles, machines, and other products and technologies are increasingly tethered to wireless infrastructure.