Exploring Privacy Issues in Mission Critical Communication: Navigating 5G and Beyond Networks

Mission critical communication (MCC) involves the exchange of information and data among emergency services, including the police, fire brigade, and other first responders, particularly during emergencies, disasters, or critical incidents. The widely-adopted TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio)-based communication for mission critical services faces challenges including limited data capacity, coverage limitations, spectrum congestion, and security concerns. Therefore, as an alternative, mission critical communication over cellular networks (4G and 5G) has emerged. While cellular-based MCC enables features like real-time video streaming and high-speed data transmission, the involvement of network operators and application service providers in the MCC architecture raises privacy concerns for mission critical users and services. For instance, the disclosure of a policeman's location details to the network operator raises privacy concerns. To the best of our knowledge, no existing work considers the privacy issues in mission critical system with respect to 5G and upcoming technologies. Therefore, in this paper, we analyse the 3GPP standardised MCC architecture within the context of 5G core network concepts and assess the privacy implications for MC users, network entities, and MC servers. The privacy analysis adheres to the deployment strategies in the standard for MCC. Additionally, we explore emerging 6G technologies, such as off-network communications, joint communication and sensing, and non-3GPP communications, to identify privacy challenges in MCC architecture. Finally, we propose privacy controls to establish a next-generation privacy-preserving MCC architecture.