DESIGN AND EVALUATION OF KEY ESCROW-BASED LAWFUL INTERCEPTION ARCHITECTURES FOR BEYOND 5G NETWORKS

Lawful Interception (LI) has been introduced in 4G mobile communications, but 5G deployment changes the previous LI procedure, due to the fact that New Generation is based on virtualization of network components. Moreover, end-to-end encryption development makes difficult to access and analyze the traffic content for authorized entities. In order to solve this problem, Key Escrow technique is introduced in the conceived LI architecture, extending 3GPP LI standard, allowing to escrow a decryption key in a third entity. In the proof-of-concept implementation, the 5G Network topology is reconstructed using Open5GS and UERANSIM. While, the LI procedure is emulated using OpenLI tools. In addition, timing evaluation is done considering all the phases of simulations and showing how file size of intercepted traffic influences them. Future works may focus on performance of simulation, increasing the maximum file size of intercepted traffic.