5G is not an thought. It’s right here, and it’s reshaping how service suppliers construct, function, and safe their networks. Workloads are shifting to the sting, latency is changing into crucial, and reaching versatile, adaptive safety has by no means been more difficult.
At Cisco, we’re leveraging our platform benefit to resolve these issues with revolutionary architectures. Over the previous couple of years, we’ve been onerous at work—reshaping how we method the evolving wants of cellular infrastructure safety. A few of what I’ll share is already dwell 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 preserving 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 assist coming quickly to the Cisco Safe Firewall 6100 Collection. This permits giant 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, supplies 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 circulate acceleration, and with some tuning, our Safe Firewall Menace Protection Digital equipment can carry out even higher when prime efficiency is crucial.
Securing the Signaling Layer
The signaling layer in cellular networks stays some of the difficult elements to safe. Like the remainder of the trade, we’re repeatedly enhancing our inspection and filtering capabilities for GTP, Diameter, and SCTP, aligning with the most recent 3GPP and GSMA requirements.
We purpose to include location-aware Diameter filtering, PFCP inspection… and different superior options, however requirements are not ample.
Signaling assaults are changing 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 huge 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 information sources can assist determine mobile-specific threats. The objective is to discover how AI can help in recognizing complicated patterns throughout signaling protocols, not as a alternative for current detection strategies however as a complementary method.
One other main problem with securing signaling protocols is correlation. A traditional instance of this may be linking GTP-C and GTP-U classes, which is notoriously tough 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 significant 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 excellent for the N6 interface as a result of it will possibly detect compromised or contaminated subscribers even in totally encrypted visitors, defending each efficiency and consumer 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 through the use of eBPF instruments to hint artifacts, corresponding to IMSI and IMEI, from the packet core. By coupling eBPF with firewall expertise, we are able to obtain extra granular firewall insurance policies.
And naturally, we maintain advancing on CGNAT. Presently, we supply glorious efficiency and optimized logging. Within the close to future, we purpose 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
Not too long ago, 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 an ordinary observe, 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 means of 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 out there on-premises and powered by Isovalent runtime safety, we take proactive safety to the following stage by introducing Distributed Exploit Safety. This functionality leverages the Tetragon agent to routinely inform us about vulnerabilities earlier than patches are launched and supply focused compensating controls—a essential benefit to reduce danger publicity the place uptime is crucial.
Closing 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 out there, others are nonetheless in improvement, however all purpose to assist service suppliers keep forward of what’s subsequent.
I’ll share extra particulars and dwell demos throughout upcoming Cisco Stay classes. Keep tuned, we’re simply getting began.
You’ll be able to register for Cisco Stay Amsterdam 2026.
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