Secure Service development and Smart Security

The target outcomes qualify the needed level of reliability, trust and resilience that applies to a critical infrastructure like 6G based on a globally connected continuum of heterogeneous environments supported by the convergence of networks and IT systems to enable new future digital services as follows:

• Identification/characterisation of the threat landscape applying to future end-to-end 6G connectivity and service systems and of the technologies and architecture to mitigate them.
• Availability of technologies supporting the necessary levels of trustworthiness, resilience, openness, transparency, and dependability expected under the EU regulations (such as GDPR and Cyber Security Act, including associated provisions including new certification processes etc) across a complete continuum incorporating the human-cyber-physical system including connectivity-service provision.
• Availability of technologies ensuring secure, privacy preserving and trustworthy services in the context of a programmable platform accessed by multi-stakeholders and tenants including vertical industries as users.
• Availability of security technologies and processes addressing the challenge of open-source solutions developed in the context of multi-vendor interoperability.
• Secure host-neutral infrastructure where multiple infrastructure providers are involved in the deployment, hosting and orchestration of the network service.
• Identification of the life cycle of smart services security and trust requirements including development, provision, operation, maintenance and of their business impact on the stakeholders’ ecosystem.
• AI technology applied to security in two ways: i) correct application of AI to enhance security in 6G; ii) consideration of potential security threats using AI.

Please refer to the "Specific Challenges and Objectives" section for Stream B in the Work Programme, available under ‘Topic Conditions and Documents - Additional Documents’.

The scope includes a set of complementary topics which will handle the securing of 6G technologies. Topics included are:

• Human Centric methods that give the control to the user to guarantee privacy and confidentiality, for both service development and service execution. It addresses potential biased usage of AI and includes both the threats directly applicable to user data traffic, and their control and management. Methods for quantification of security to make the users aware of the systems and services used and associated risks is in scope as well as technologies for enhanced policy management (including huge data analytics, AI and cloud-native management and serverless approach) and facilitating human-understandable policies on trust and security of automated systems, to raise user awareness.
• Holistic Smart Service frameworks which with secure lifecycle management and operation cover the development, provision, deployment, orchestration, and consumption of services for a new computing continuum that spans across multiple heterogeneous domains. Holistic Smart Service Frameworks include: a) IoT Device-Edge-Cloud continuum management and orchestration on virtualized and software-based elements, hardware accelerators, well as serverless frameworks, enabling zero-touch service automation; b) abstraction methods to support the network elements and providing flexible APIs, facilitating their combination addressing different orchestration styles at blurring RAN, MEC, Core and Cloud segments; c) new service developments to exploit of infrastructure slicing and sharing, capability exposure, discovery, and composition, for end-to-end management in the ICT continuum; d) end-to-end resource self-configuration and management based on key parameters such as service type, network traffic, channel conditions or mobility scenarios; e) composition methods able to handle situations where interconnected services are not known in advance, and able to model consequences (e.g., “digital twins”) with legal or ethical dimension, including new service-models that enhance human-centricity and interaction capabilities.
• Secure Lifecycle management targets the provision of a smart, secure, adaptive, and efficient service management, spanning the lifecycle of smart networks and services (including vertical support), to manage risks and costs. It covers improved predictive orchestration algorithms for optimal usage of resources (processing, storage, networking) in terms of trust and risk level whilst bringing down OPEX and energy consumption for flexible provisioning of service instances and supports recursive deployments of functional components for secure multi-tenancy. It addresses AI-based service co-design to evolve DevSecOps methods that meet ethical, legal, social, economic, and energy-efficiency requirements together with tools for ‘security by design’ and for creation of “safer” services, to manage risks from dynamically evolving requirements and threats. Drastic incident reduction and response time for massive supervision of infrastructure elements is in scope as well as mechanisms for infrastructure and service certification for security and performance. The work also covers secured programmability with mechanisms to verify data authenticity and truthfulness (e.g., smart contracts, fact checking services), along with trusted digital interactions, especially in dynamically- composed service environments, including software engineering methodologies and tools and cost-effective certification in dynamically changing systems
• Efficient security enablers build capability for untrusted environments. Security techniques using Artificial Intelligence, rule-based, statistical, contextual analysis and potentially relying in Distributed Ledger Technologies to improve trust in networking elements and service functions are in scope, as well as techniques to guarantee the trustworthiness and security of systems based on disaggregated cloud environments and able to reliably handle seamlessly any hardware of software element from different suppliers. Enablers can build upon developing technologies such as Full Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), Multi Party Computation (MPC), Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP), Anonymisation/pseudonymization, data integrity of AI-based process constitute a set of relevant topics. Enablers should help to anticipate known potential threats which will mature based on other technological advances within the timeframe of the development and potential first deployments of 6G. Such threats though not yet active, are well known and are anticipated by the ICT community (e.g. Shor’s algorithm). New cryptographic techniques, and techniques to manage and distribute keys, are in development and maturing. Such techniques may be applied to end-to-end smart network security, reaching beyond performance and protection capabilities of traditional symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic and associated key exchange techniques.

Projects may address one or more of these topics.