IoT cybersecurity in 5G and beyond: a systematic literature review

Abstract

The 5th generation (5G) and beyond use Internet of Things (IoT) to offer the feature of remote monitoring for different applications such as transportation, healthcare, and energy. There are several advantages of 5G and beyond for IoT applications like high speed and low latency. However, they are prone to cybersecurity threats due to networks softwarization and virtualization, thus raising additional security challenges and complexities. In this paper, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of cybersecurity for 5G and beyond-enabled IoT. By developing a taxonomy to classify and characterize existing research, we identified and analyzed strategies, key patterns, mechanisms, performance evaluation, validation parameters and challenges of cybersecurity and resilience for 5G and beyond-enabled IoT in existing studies. We used “Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA)” recommendations for this SLR. Through our search in scientific databases, 4449 records published between 2017 and 2023 were initially identified, which were then reduced to 558 records after title and abstract screening to be considered for the eligibility check process. After screening the full-text, 79 articles were finalized for thorough analysis. The findings of this study suggest that 35% of the included studies focus on authentication and access control as security aspects, 59% studies are based on combination of both network layer and application layer as main operation layer, and 34% of the included studies use real-time implementation for validation purpose while the remaining studies utilize simulation or theoretical analysis. Our SLR also highlights open research challenges of 5G and beyond-enabled IoT cybersecurity and suggests a tentative solution for each challenge, which can be a focus of future research. Finally, key limitations of our SLR and threats to validity are addressed.