SPEC5G: A Dataset for 5G Cellular Network Protocol Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces SPEC5G, a large-scale dataset of 5G protocol texts designed to facilitate NLP-based analysis, security assessment, and summarization, thereby automating aspects of protocol development and security analysis.

Contribution

The paper presents the first public 5G dataset for NLP research, enabling automated security analysis and protocol summarization using large-scale language models.

Findings

Effective security-related text classification using the dataset

Successful protocol summarization to aid understanding

Demonstrated value in automating 5G protocol analysis

Abstract

5G is the 5th generation cellular network protocol. It is the state-of-the-art global wireless standard that enables an advanced kind of network designed to connect virtually everyone and everything with increased speed and reduced latency. Therefore, its development, analysis, and security are critical. However, all approaches to the 5G protocol development and security analysis, e.g., property extraction, protocol summarization, and semantic analysis of the protocol specifications and implementations are completely manual. To reduce such manual effort, in this paper, we curate SPEC5G the first-ever public 5G dataset for NLP research. The dataset contains 3,547,586 sentences with 134M words, from 13094 cellular network specifications and 13 online websites. By leveraging large-scale pre-trained language models that have achieved state-of-the-art results on NLP tasks, we use this dataset for security-related text classification and summarization. Security-related text classification can be used to extract relevant security-related properties for protocol testing. On the other hand, summarization can help developers and practitioners understand the high level of the protocol, which is itself a daunting task. Our results show the value of our 5G-centric dataset in 5G protocol analysis automation. We believe that SPEC5G will enable a new research direction into automatic analyses for the 5G cellular network protocol and numerous related downstream tasks. Our data and code are publicly available.