The advances on recent communication paradigms brings new security and privacy challenges, mainly about personal data collection by smart devices. Resource constrained devices face serious issues to run complex cryptographic algorithms. Trying to evaluate the performance impact of those algorithms in usual and common devices used in smart homes, in this paper we tested the impact of different cryptographic algorithms in low computational devices, typically used in smart devices applied in smart homes, testing different security configurations and using the two most used transport protocols (HTTP and MQTT). The experiment measures their effects on six commonly used embedded devices in IoT WSNs: ESP8622, ESP32, and Raspberry Pi (RPi) from 1 to 4. The experiment measured the power consumption, message delay, and additional message length (bytes). Moreover, the analysis was also used to model security algorithms. The experimental results from long runs (72 hours) reveal the cryptographic solution choice is significant for the message delay and additional message length.

Network slicing emerges as a key technology in next generation networks, boosted by the integration of software‐defined networking and network functions virtualization. However, while allowing resource sharing among multiple tenants, such networks must also ensure the security requirements needed for the scenarios they are employed. This letter presents the leading security challenges on the use of network slices at the packet core, the solutions that academy and industry are proposing to address them, pointing out some directions that should be considered.

Private 5G networks has become a popular choice of various vertical industries to build dedicated and secure wireless networks in industry environments to deploy their services with enhanced service flexibility and device connectivity to foster industry digitalization. This article proposes multiple multi-domain solutions to deploy private 5G networks for vertical industries across their local premises and interconnecting them with the public networks. Such scenarios open up a new market segment for various stakeholders, and break the current operators’ business and service provisioning models. This, in turn, demands new interactions among the different stakeholders across their administrative domains. To this aim, three distinct levels of multi-domain solutions for deploying vertical’s 5G private networks are proposed in this work, which can support interactions at different layers among various stakeholders, allowing for different levels of service exposure and control. Building on a set of industry verticals (comprising Industry 4.0, Transportation and Energy), different deployment models are analyzed and the proposed multi-domain solutions are applied. These solutions are implemented and validated through two proof-of-concept prototypes integrating a 5G private network platform (5Growth platform) with public ones. These solutions are being implemented in three vertical pilots conducted with real industry verticals. The obtained results demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed multi-domain solutions applied at the three layers of the system enabling various levels of interactions among the different stakeholders. The achieved end-to-end service instantiation time across multiple domains is in the range of minutes, where the delay impact caused by the resultant multi-domain interactions is considerably low. The proposed multi-domain approaches offer generic solutions and standard interfaces to support the different private network deployment models.

This systematic review examines serverless security mechanisms proposed between 2018 and 2024, categorizing them into a layered security model comprising runtime, network, function, orchestration, and data. The proposed model provides a structured framework to analyze serverless-specific threats and protective measures that can be used in future works to better contextualize the threat scope of new protection techniques. Our findings reveal notable advancements in serverless security but highlight persistent gaps, such as function-level observability or data lifecycle protection. In addition to cataloging existing mechanisms, we identify key research directions and share all review data to facilitate future studies. This work advances the understanding of serverless security and offers a foundation for developing more robust protective measures.

5G has been heralded as a critical, decisive technology for verticals’ digital transformation. It targets innovative technical capabilities, allowing dedicated and improved communication mechanisms, going beyond the mere performance increase experienced by past generations’ evolution. Despite the literature already envisaging the application of 5G-enabled solutions in vertical-based deployments, there is still a lack of experimental insights shedding light on the actual feasibility of 5G capabilities in specific vertical deployments. This gap is particularly evident in verticals that did not traditionally rely on mobile network solutions for their communication needs, such as safety-related control signals in railway operations. This paper aims to fill this gap by delivering an extensive empirical analysis performed through a 5G-enabled railway deployment. We designed and implemented a joint testbed, which allows us to faithfully reproduce two important transportation railway use cases that leverage 5G communications involving the vertical, communication service solutions operator, and integration actors. There, we expose the necessary integration engineering behind the enablement of 5G capabilities in such scenarios, considering the highly safety-certified and standardized environment of railway vertical sector regulations (which never considered the utilization of mobile networks in their development). We empirically demonstrate the performance capability achieved by the 5G-enabled network using two different systems, a carrier-grade one and an open-development one, in light of the required key performance indicators. To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first field trial and empirical evaluation of the suitability of 5G with the implementation of a 5G-enabled railway cross-level scenario within the transportation context.

One of the most challenging KPIs defined by the ITU-T (IMT-2020) for 5G is “latency below 1 ms”. This is a key requirement for an emerging era of new applications, such as virtual and augmented reality, video analytics, or Industry 4.0. Those applications require low latency to enable the so-called tactile Internet. However, relying on large centralized datacenters as today, this requirement defies the laws of physics. The solution is edge computing, a technology aiming to deploy applications at the edge of the network, closer to end users. Altice Labs has been following the standardization of this technology, and is currently prototyping a fully functional and ETSI MEC standard-compliant solution. The first version of this prototype has been already released, and a proof-of-concept has been deployed in a Lab environment. This paper describes the edge computing technology, the prototype under development, the PoC integration and the results of the preliminary evaluation already performed.