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5G is a high-bandwidth low-latency communication technology that requires deploying new cellular base stations. The environmental cost of deploying a 5G cellular network remains unknown. In this work we answer several questions about the environmental impact of 5G deployment, including: Can we reuse minerals from discarded 4G base stations to build 5G or does 5G require new minerals that were not required in 4G base stations? And, how sustainable is this transition? We answered these questions buy surveying the minerals needed to build 5G base stations. We found that the key technologies behind 5G require additional rare-earth metals to build essential semiconductor components needed for 5G, such as yttrium, barium, gallium, and germanium. Additionally, since 5G needs many more base stations than 4G network to achieve the same coverage, we describe how 5G will likely increase the use of materials like copper, gold, and aluminum, all of which are difficult or impractical to recycle from the 4G base stations they will replace. We estimate that to provide coverage comparable to 4G in the United States, we will need about 600 million 5G base stations, which will consume thousands of tons of these metals and significant amount of fossil fuels, as well as will result in releasing toxic gases during material mining and refining. Despite these environment costs, we also describe the environmental benefits that a 5G network can offer.
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This content will become publicly available on August 14, 2025
Hermes: Unlocking Security Analysis of Cellular Network Protocols by Synthesizing Finite State Machines from Natural Language Specifications
In this paper, we present Hermes, an end-to-end framework to automatically generate formal representations from natural language cellular specifications. We first develop a neural constituency parser, NEUTREX, to process transition-relevant texts and extract transition components (i.e., states, conditions, and actions). We also design a domain-specific language to translate these transition components to logical formulas by leveraging dependency parse trees. Finally, we compile these logical formulas to generate transitions and create the formal model as finite state machines. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Hermes, we evaluate it on 4G NAS, 5G NAS, and 5G RRC specifications and obtain an overall accuracy of 81-87%, which is a substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art. Our security analysis of the extracted models uncovers 3 new vulnerabilities and identifies 19 previous attacks in 4G and 5G specifications, and 7 deviations in commercial 4G basebands.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2326898
- PAR ID:
- 10535452
- Publisher / Repository:
- USENIX Association
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 978-1-939133-44-1
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Philadelphia, PA, USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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