5G Mobile Cyber Security (Asset-First Threat Modeling)

Purpose of the Roundtable Session:

The Roundtable aims to address the gap between identifying technical cyber threats and securing high level assets within the current cybersecurity landscape, particularly large organizations such as telecommunications operators. Security teams often identify numerous cyber threats but may not translate these findings into actionable insights for decision makers. Consequently, organizations may not fully relate cybersecurity risks to their most critical assets, such as products, services, data, and strategic resources. This disconnect limits leaders’ ability to recognize threats to their organization’s strategic value and impacts the effectiveness of the decision-making process.

A nationwide 5G threat model must consider the perspectives of various stakeholders, since 5G is not one unified technology. Instead, it is a multifaceted, disaggregated system of systems. Thus, each group of stakeholders can view the 5G attack surface through different, yet equally legitimate, threat lenses.

None of the stakeholders possesses a complete view of the risk. It would be risky to have a national-level threat model that consists of a single perspective.

Breaking down the distinct viewpoints:

1. The National Security / Government View
2. The Mobile Network Operator (MNO) View
3. The 5G Mobile Network Vendor View
4. The Enterprise Adopter / Private 5G View

Benefits of the Asset-Driven Threat Modeling Approach:

1. Better Prioritization of Threats: As seen, business assets help filter out low-impact issues at the very beginning. Security resources can then focus on fewer scenarios, and those scenarios, if they occur, would have catastrophic impacts such as major outages or significant data loss. This top-down risk focus eliminates the possibility of getting lost in technical details when the real danger is elsewhere. Industry experts recommend defining the most essential assets and functions as crown jewels in the first step to ensure defenses mitigate the most important threats.
2. Clear Alignment with Business Objectives: A business-oriented threat model is naturally expressed in the language of business continuity, safety, and compliance. Communication with leadership becomes more effective, for example, explaining a threat as a risk of losing customer trust through a data breach rather than as an SQL injection on database X. This alignment was one of the driving forces behind frameworks such as PASTA, which bridged the gap between technical threats and business impact and fostered collaboration between technical and business divisions.
3. Reduction of Effort and Data Overload: By concentrating on a few high-level threats, one can greatly simplify the analysis. As mentioned above, conventional threat modeling may be time-intensive because the number of threats increases quickly with the complexity of the system. The ability to focus on what is necessary saves time because there is less to cover. It also helps security teams address the problem of alert fatigue or data overload, i.e., when there are too many threat indicators or vulnerabilities in the data, making it difficult to notice the truly dangerous problems. With such business context, teams can focus on applicable threats and disregard noise.
4. Holistic Risk Coverage: Ironically, beginning with business assets can offer more inclusive risk coverage, since it compels analysts to adopt a wider scope of thinking on how any threat, however unusual, may affect the most important business processes. The asset-driven process tends to introduce new ways of thinking (for example, involving business continuity managers, legal and compliance officers, in addition to cybersecurity specialists). It also assists in identifying non-technical or indirect threats (for example, insider abuse of reputation or third-party failure affecting compliance) that a purely technical checklist would not detect. This approach prevents the moderately high incidence of false negatives that some technical threat modeling research reports, by ensuring that all scenarios with substantial business impact are taken into account, even if they are not typical technical attacks.
5. Strategic Decision-Making and Resilience: A threat model that is associated with business assets is ultimately used to facilitate risk management and resilience planning at a higher level. It forms the foundation for scenarios related to business continuity drills (e.g., How would we deal with a week-long network outage?), investment choices (e.g., We must fund X to prevent a customer data leak?), and strategies to comply with regulations (e.g., These controls are necessary to avoid regulatory fines?).

This strategy moves cybersecurity off the technical shelf and into business strategy, serving as the best evidence of how an organization can translate cyber threats into business risk and determine what investments can mitigate that risk in the most optimal way possible.

Why This Requires a Roundtable

A roundtable is the required method because the problem is not technical but one of consensus and trust.

1. To Establish a Common Framework: A roundtable is a workshop format designed to achieve consensus and ensure that all stakeholders subscribe to a single, unified, hybrid "common language" that can align these fragmented efforts.
2. To Solve the Governance and Trust Problem: A threat library is of no use if no one contributes to it. The biggest hurdle is persuading fierce rivals (such as competing MNOs) and government agencies to share their most sensitive vulnerability and attack data.
   A roundtable serves as a facilitated forum to build human trust and a "shared need" to establish a formal governance body, such as an information-sharing entity. This body must provide the legal and operational framework necessary to enable safe, collaborative information sharing.

In short, a roundtable is the only mechanism capable of resolving the human problems of consensus and trust, which are the essential prerequisites to creating any effective technical solution, such as a national 5G threat library.