Why 5G requires new approaches to cybersecurity

5G will be a physical overhaul of our essential networks that will have decades-long impact. Because 5G is the conversion to a mostly all-software network, future upgrades will be software updates much like the current upgrades to your smartphone. Because of the cyber vulnerabilities of software, the tougher part of the real 5G “race” is to retool how we secure the most important network of the 21st century and the ecosystem of devices and applications that sprout from that network.

Key #1: Companies must recognize and be held responsible for a new cyber duty of care: Traditionally, common law established that those who provide products and services have a duty of care to identify and mitigate potential harms that could result. There needs to be a new corporate culture in which cyber risk is treated as an essential corporate duty and rewarded with appropriate incentives, whether in monetary, regulatory, or other forms.

Key #2: Government must establish a new cyber regulatory paradigm to reflect the new realities: Replacing the rigid industrial-era relationship between government and business with more innovative and agile means of dealing with the shared problem.

[Tom Wheeler was Federal Communications Commission Chairman from 2013 to 2017. Rear Admiral David Simpson, USN (Ret.), was chief of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau during the same period.]