ENISA – Fog and Edge Computing in 5G

• November 23, 2023
• Andrew

In recent years, fog and edge technologies have rapidly emerged in the telecommunications field with their fast integration in the 5G domain. Several national, European and international developments have led to a clearer picture of 5G infrastructure and its leverage on fog and edge developments at various levels. The fog and edge security specifications have been detailed from various standardisation bodies across different sectors and have found application to different verticals. Moreover, at the EU level, different heterogeneous vertical fog- and edgedriven pilots have been developed and different extension schemes for 5G are envisaged, in preparation for potential requests to ENISA issued by the European Commission Cybersecurity Certification Group in the future.

The ambition of this report is to outline the various security aspects of fog and edge computing in the 5G domain. This includes the technical risks, and therefore trust and resilience, in the telco ecosystem.

Target group

This information may be useful to a variety of target groups, namely the following.

• Non-technical stakeholders such as policymakers, regulators and law enforcement
• Experts working in the telecommunication and cloud computing sectors, such as operators, vendors and service providers
• Businesses, consultants and product developers
• Experts in research and innovation

Structure

This report presents the results of the vulnerability and threat assessment work that was
performed in the following way:

• Chapter 2 presents an overview of the components of the fog and edge paradigms,with details on and an analysis of their corresponding architectures, attributes and security aspects. The presented features are detailed in relation to 5G, and the interaction impacts each domain and its related stakeholders.
• Chapter 3 presents the standardisation activities related to fog and edge computing for 5G in terms of security. A set of specifications from different standardisation bodies is presented in brief, as well as how these have impacted the security specification of the different fog and edge domains.
• Chapter 4 presents the current opportunities for fog and edge computing in the field of 5G, namely in terms of scalability, reliability, sustainability, heterogeneity and federation from different enablers across heterogeneous technology domains.
• Chapter 5 presents the security aspects from different technology domains and how these are leveraged and impact the fog and edge paradigms for 5G. This chapter covers a collection of different enablers in regard to security from the entire spectrum of cloud and telco technologies.
• Chapter 6 presents an overview of different security application scenarios for fog and edge computing in 5G and how these impact privacy and security aspects as a whole.
• Chapter 7 provides recommendations and conclusions drawn from the technology and security analysis.