A Survey of Subscription Privacy on the 5G Radio Interface - The Past, Present and Future

End-user privacy in mobile telephony systems is nowadays of great interest because of the envisaged hyper-connectivity and the potential of the unprecedented services (virtual reality, machine-type communication, vehicle-to-everything, IoT, etc.) being offered by the new 5G system. This paper reviews the state of subscription privacy in 5G systems. As the work on 5G Release 15 -- the first full set of 5G standards -- has recently been completed, this seems to be an appropriate occasion for such a review. The scope of the privacy study undertaken is limited to the wireless part of the 5G system which occurs between the service provider\u27s base station and the subscriber\u27s mobile phone. Although 5G offers better privacy guarantees than its predecessors, this work highlights that there still remain significant issues which need rectifying. We undertook an endeavor to (i) compile the privacy vulnerabilities that already existed in the previous mobile telephony generations. Thereafter, (ii) the privacy improvements offered by the recently finalized 5G standard were aggregated. Consequently, (iii) we were able to highlight privacy issues from previous generations that remain unresolved in 5G Release 15. For completeness, (iv) we also explore new privacy attacks which surfaced after the publication of the 5G standard. To address the identified privacy gaps, we also present future research directions in the form of proposed improvements

Identity Confidentiality in 5G Mobile Telephony Systems

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) recently proposed a standard for 5G telecommunications, containing an identity protection scheme meant to address the long-outstanding privacy problem of permanent subscriber-identity disclosure. The proposal is essentially two disjoint phases: an identification phase, followed by an establishment of security context between mobile subscribers and their service providers via symmetric-key based authenticated key agreement. Currently, 3GPP proposes to protect the identification phase with a public-key based solution, and while the current proposal is secure against a classical adversary, the same would not be true of a quantum adversary. 5G specifications target very long-term deployment scenarios (well beyond the year 2030), therefore it is imperative that quantum-secure alternatives be part of the current specification. In this paper, we present such an alternative scheme for the problem of private identification protection. Our solution is compatible with the current 5G specifications, depending mostly on cryptographic primitives already specified in 5G, adding minimal performance overhead and requiring minor changes in existing message structures. Finally, we provide a detailed formal security analysis of our solution in a novel security framework

Quantum Long Short-Term Memory (QLSTM) vs Classical LSTM in Time Series Forecasting: A Comparative Study in Solar Power Forecasting

Accurately forecasting solar power generation is crucial in the global progression towards sustainable energy systems. In this study, we conduct a meticulous comparison between Quantum Long Short-Term Memory (QLSTM) and classical Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models for solar power production forecasting. Our controlled experiments reveal promising advantages of QLSTMs, including accelerated training convergence and substantially reduced test loss within the initial epoch compared to classical LSTMs. These empirical findings demonstrate QLSTM's potential to swiftly assimilate complex time series relationships, enabled by quantum phenomena like superposition. However, realizing QLSTM's full capabilities necessitates further research into model validation across diverse conditions, systematic hyperparameter optimization, hardware noise resilience, and applications to correlated renewable forecasting problems. With continued progress, quantum machine learning can offer a paradigm shift in renewable energy time series prediction. This pioneering work provides initial evidence substantiating quantum advantages over classical LSTM, while acknowledging present limitations. Through rigorous benchmarking grounded in real-world data, our study elucidates a promising trajectory for quantum learning in renewable forecasting. Additional research and development can further actualize this potential to achieve unprecedented accuracy and reliability in predicting solar power generation worldwide.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure

Pragmatic Authenticated Key Agreement for IEEE Std 802.15.6

The IEEE Std 802.15.6 is the latest international standard for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). The security of communication in this standard is based upon four elliptic-curve based key agreement protocols. These protocols have been shown to exhibit serious security vulnerabilities but surprisingly, do not provision any privacy guarantees. To date, no suitable key agreement protocol has been proposed which fulfils all the requisite objectives for IEEE Std 802.15.6. In this paper two key agreement protocols are presented which, in addition to being efficient and provisioning advance security properties, also offer the essential privacy attributes of anonymity and unlinkability. The protocols are also quantum-safe as they are independent of any public-key based operations. We develop a formal security and privacy model in an appropriate complexity-theoretic framework and prove the proposed protocols secure in this model

Pragmatic authenticated key agreement for IEEE Std 802.15.6

The IEEE Std 802.15.6 is the latest international standard for Wireless Body Area Networks. The security of communication in this standard is based upon four elliptic-curve-based key agreement protocols. These protocols have been shown to exhibit serious security vulnerabilities but surprisingly, do not provision any privacy guarantees. To date, no suitable key agreement protocol has been proposed which fulfills all the requisite objectives for IEEE Std 802.15.6. In this paper, two key agreement protocols are presented which, in addition to being efficient and provisioning advance security properties, also offer the essential privacy attributes of anonymity and unlinkability. We develop a formal security and privacy model in an appropriate complexity-theoretic framework and prove the proposed protocols secure in this model.ISSN:1615-5262ISSN:1615-527

Potential of halophytes as cattle fodder : A case-study in Pakistan

Good quality water and arable land are needed to grow conventional crops to provide food for human and animal population. However, burgeoning world population leading to wide spread urbanization and industrialization is aggressively sharing these resources. A solution may be found in using saline water and salinized lands to produce quality animal feed from salt tolerant plants. In this study, two halophytic grasses (Panicum antid tale and Desmostachya bipinnata) were tested for their potential to replace conventional cattle fodder in the diet of cattle. Four trials were conducted in which cow calves were fed diets containing above mentioned halophytes alone or in combination with conventional fodders (wheat and maize). Weight gain in animals fed diets supplemented with halophytes were generally at par with or in few cases marginally better than those on conventional fodder. For instance, P. antid tale increased the calf weight around 15% when used as green and 8% in case of hay. Feeding Berseem (Trifolium alexandrinum, 15% crude protein) as the only source of concentrate in a diet containing D. bipinnata sustained weight only for about 6-7 weeks after which it started to decrease. Supplementing the diet with a regular concentrate was subsequently needed to restore weight gain. Halophytes as green/hay/concentrate were as good as conventional fodder regarding dressed meat. The protein content of meat was showing increasing trend when replacing conventional fodders with halophytes, particularly 20% protein was higher in meat when Prosopis juliflora pods and Manilkara zapota were used as concentrate and P. antidotale as hay in diet.Scopu