LOS ANGELES — 5G's impacts on society will be immense, and so will its security implications, said Mary O'Neill, VP of security at Nokia during a press conference Tuesday at MWC Los Angeles 2019.

During a brief Q&A, Nokia CTO Mike Murphy drove home the potential for extremely low-latency, high bandwidth cellular connectivity to open doors to new use cases including those in healthcare, transportation, and IoT. The creation of these new use cases is similar to how 4G enabled an entire app economy, but on a much larger scale.

However, according to O'Neill, there be monsters lurking in these uncharted verticals, especially with IoT devices. These devices represent just 16% of traffic today but account for 78% of the malware on the mobile network.

These impacts will be particularly problematic with unmanaged IoT devices that don't receive regular security patches to protect them from vulnerabilities — for example home surveillance cameras.

"If an IoT device today is plugged into the network, and it doesn't have protection in it, it's infected in three minutes or less," O'Neill said, adding that it's a huge problem that makes for a vastly expanded attack surface.

For this reason, O'Neill explained that Nokia has a very strict security compliance process called Design For Security, or DFSEC, to test its equipment to make sure it has done everything to mitigate the risk.

"Nokia has a process called DFSEC. We can't release the product unless that product is compliant to our very stringent security requirements," she said, adding that when it comes to security it doesn't stop there.

However, O'Neill notes that the challenges don't stop with the hardware vendor. The responsibility also falls on service providers and governments to play their part in preserving security and maintaining user privacy.

Despite the risks, Murphy maintains that security was much better thought out in 5G than it was previous generations. Some of this comes down to how mobile networks have been used up until now. With 4G, network traffic was almost exclusively consumer facing.

"If you have an attack, it affects a person, and that's not great," he said. "But when we enter the verticals or enterprises like smart cities, autonomous vehicles, remote surgery — an attack has a significantly worse impact."

He said as network operators begin to transition their networks off their older 4G core and onto a standalone 5G core — which he expects to begin happening late next year — many of the technology's advantages will be realized.

Network slicing is one of these technologies that will enable greater degrees of security for the 5G network.

"You have ways to basically segregate the traffic," said Sandro Tavares, head of mobile networks marketing at Nokia. "If a threat is located in one slice, it's not going to the other slices."