Monitoring for Open5GS in Secure and Low-Footprint 5G Deployments

This work presents low-latency-focused monitoring for secure 5G control-plane mobile networks. We emphasize encrypted internal communication and minimal performance overhead along with effective OS-specific deployment, including potential ARM support. The solution is built over Open5GS Packet Core implementation project to match the best performance and smooth deployment over different hardware. The proposed system extracts data from the protocol level by modifying the Open5GS source code. The system uses asynchronous reporting using the UDP. The core processing unit for the incoming logs is solved by the ELK stack (ElasticSearch, Logstash, and Kibana) as a robust solution with wide options of performance configuration depending on the system’s needs. The alert mechanisms are managed by logstash custom filters and the ElastAlert2 project. A custom light-weight alert dispatcher server is introduced to gather and forward the alerts to the end-user. For demonstration purposes, the Discord Webhook API was chosen. Although not covering the entire spectrum of complex alert scenarios, these tools provide us with enough capabilities to demonstrate the fundamental approach of the project.