Inside 5G IoT Remote SIM Provisioning: Security Gaps and Efficiency Trade-offs
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The rapid expansion of massive Internet of things (IoT) deployments and the transition toward 5G networks have intensified the need for secure and scalable Remote SIM Provisioning (RSP) mechanisms. Unlike the Consumer and Machine-to-machine (M2M) RSP families, IoT-RSP operates across heterogeneous device classes, intermittent links, and delegated management roles, resulting in a broader attack surface and increased exposure to protocol-level threats. This article presents an integrated investigation of IoT-RSP that combines ProVerif-based symbolic analysis with reproducible benchmarking. The formal analysis shows that the dominant risks arise from binding, authorization, completion evidence, state consistency, and key-custody assumptions rather than from direct breaks of the profile-encryption primitive. The performance evaluation reports a physical consumer eUICC baseline of 50 successful profile installations with a median time of 27.991 s, an eIM-emulated ESipa control-plane benchmark under independent link impairment, local TLS/reuse/payload sensitivity, STM32F446RE/Mbed TLS crypto-kernel timings, and calibrated fleet-simulation results. These results clarify where security hardening remains practical, where this Cortex-M4 testbed exposes bottlenecks, and how IoT RSP should be deployed within the limits of the available testbed.
Institution: Kookmin University
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7202393378