Authentication and TLS for SBI

TLS Between NFs

TS 33.501 (5G security architecture) mandates TLS 1.2 or higher for all SBI traffic between NFs. In practice TLS 1.3 is the modern default. Mutual TLS (mTLS) — where both client and server authenticate each other using X.509 certificates — is recommended for production deployments and required when NFs span security domains. The certificate management problem at 5GC scale is real: an operator running hundreds of NF instances needs automated issuance, rotation, and revocation. cert-manager on Kubernetes plus an internal CA is one common solution; service mesh sidecars (Istio, Linkerd) handle…