When 5G Security Meets Natural Language Processing: Challenges and Future Pathways

The recent development and usage prevalence of mobile telecommunication protocols comes with the need for more effective and efficient research on cellular network security. Recent approaches have started to focus on utilizing 3GPP documents analysis with Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to uncover potential weaknesses at the architecture and design level. This promising method can both significantly reduce the amount of labor needed to conduct security research and provide researchers with the root causes of security vulnerabilities. This paper provides a survey of recent NLP-based approaches for security enhancements and vulnerability discovery in 3GPP-defined network protocols. From the insights gained, this paper proposes how NLP can be further applied to security research for 5G protocol, and what the challenges coming along with that approach are.