5G is not an thought. It’s right here, and it’s reshaping how service suppliers construct, function, and safe their networks. Workloads are transferring to the sting, latency is turning into vital, and attaining versatile, adaptive safety has by no means been tougher.
At Cisco, we’re leveraging our platform benefit to unravel these issues with modern architectures. Over the previous couple of years, now we have been arduous at work—reshaping how we strategy the evolving wants of cellular infrastructure safety. A few of what I’ll share is already reside with prospects, and a few is nonetheless being examined internally.
This isn’t a product launch or a roadmap. It’s only a glimpse into what’s conserving us busy and why I’m so enthusiastic about what’s coming subsequent.
Safety Gateway: Designed for Scalability
Let’s start with the Safety Gateway.
We’ve already shipped distributed VPN on the Cisco Safe Firewall 4200 Collection platform, with help coming quickly to the Cisco Safe Firewall 6100 Collection. This enables massive IPsec tunnels to be unfold throughout a number of cluster members (as much as 16), offering near-linear scalability.
We additionally launched loopback tunnel termination, which simplifies underlay routing and fault tolerance. When speaking to our service supplier shoppers, a recurring theme we hear from them is their seek for new 5G use instances to generate income. This naturally pushes workloads nearer to the sting, whether or not on telco cloud or public cloud.
For Open RAN deployments, Cilium CNI from Isovalent, now a part of Cisco, offers native encryption on the OS layer throughout Kubernetes pods. For prime-performance IPsec VMs, our three-year partnership with NVIDIA continues to ship. We’re seeing spectacular leads to crypto offload and stream acceleration, and with some tuning, our Safe Firewall Risk Protection Digital equipment can carry out even higher when high efficiency is vital.
Securing the Signaling Layer
The signaling layer in cellular networks stays probably the most difficult components to safe. Like the remainder of the trade, we’re constantly enhancing our inspection and filtering capabilities for GTP, Diameter, and SCTP, aligning with the most recent 3GPP and GSMA requirements.
We goal to include location-aware Diameter filtering, PFCP inspection… and different superior options, however requirements are not enough.
Signaling assaults are turning into extra subtle, and SOC and NOC groups require visibility and correlation that surpass fundamental detection.
That’s the place Cisco’s strengths actually shine: AI and enormous language fashions supported by community telemetry and Cisco Talos menace intelligence. We’ve began experimenting with our open-source Cisco Basis AI 8B mannequin to perceive whether or not these knowledge sources may help determine mobile-specific threats. The aim is to discover how AI can help in recognizing complicated patterns throughout signaling protocols, not as a substitute for present detection strategies however as a complementary strategy.
One other main problem with securing signaling protocols is correlation. A basic instance of this might be linking GTP-C and GTP-U classes, which is notoriously troublesome as a result of these protocols will not be essentially destined for the identical gear. With the acquisition of Splunk, we’re actively working to simplify and automate this correlation use case for our prospects.
GI and N6 Firewall: Enhancing Visibility and Context
Efficiency is important in cellular networks, and our 4200 and 6100 platforms ship the pace and scalability operators want. The 6100 now helps over 80 cases, offering flexibility for big deployments.
A key differentiator is the Encrypted Visibility Engine, or EVE. It’s superb for the N6 interface as a result of it will possibly detect compromised or contaminated subscribers even in absolutely encrypted visitors, defending each efficiency and person expertise.
We’re coaching EVE to acknowledge mobile-specific menace patterns and plan to make its insights shareable through APIs so different instruments like DPI programs can make the most of this data. We’re additionally exploring methods to make firewall insurance policies extra “mobile-aware.” One of many methods we’re capable of obtain that is by utilizing eBPF instruments to hint artifacts, similar to IMSI and IMEI, from the packet core. By coupling eBPF with firewall know-how, we are able to obtain extra granular firewall insurance policies.
And naturally, we hold advancing on CGNAT. At present, we provide wonderful efficiency and optimized logging. Within the close to future, we goal so as to add deterministic NAT and DS-lite together with dashboards in Grafana and Splunk to make monitoring and troubleshooting extra easy.
Packet Core Microsegmentation
Just lately, 3GPP made it a requirement to implement microsegmentation, mTLS, 0Auth, and encryption contained in the packet core. This requirement emphasizes the significance mitigating unauthorized lateral motion as a normal apply, nonetheless, deploying these controls are difficult for a lot of service supplier organizations.
Cilium CNI from Isovalent helps simplify assembly this requirement by offering identity-aware segmentation, mTLS, and 0Auth inbuilt. Operators can apply the required 3GPP controls by a single enforcement mannequin, simplifying operations for a lot of service suppliers and serving to them extra simply meet compliance.
With Hypershield quickly to be obtainable on-premises and powered by Isovalent runtime safety, we take proactive safety to the subsequent stage by introducing Distributed Exploit Safety. This functionality leverages the Tetragon agent to robotically inform us about vulnerabilities earlier than patches are launched and supply focused compensating controls—a essential benefit to decrease danger publicity the place uptime is vital.
Remaining Ideas
As talked about earlier, this isn’t a roadmap or advertising pitch. It’s a window into what Cisco groups are constructing to make cellular infrastructure smarter, safer, and extra resilient.
Some options are already obtainable, others are nonetheless in growth, however all goal to assist service suppliers keep forward of what’s subsequent.
I’ll share extra particulars and reside demos throughout upcoming Cisco Dwell classes. Keep tuned, we’re simply getting began.
You’ll be able to register for Cisco Dwell Amsterdam 2026.
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