Realizing this secure-by-design paradigm will result in four main characteristics (outer shell of figure 2) that 6G will incorporate to serve as society’s fully trusted communication system.
The privacy preserving characteristic has become even more critical with the planned proliferation of AI and data usage in 6G. Confidentiality of both machine learning (ML) models and training and inference data must be ensured. Privacy preservation for sensitive data and models must be considered for the entire AI lifecycle.
Besides AI, there are new use cases such as sensing, digital twins, XR, immersive experience, and avatar communications, which will involve data in need of privacy protection. This will require robust user consent management frameworks for dynamic update and revocation of user consent. It needs to be complemented by regular auditing to align with regulations.
6G will be a part of our society’s critical infrastructure and, hence, must be resilient and reliable. It must ensure the availability of essential services by designing protective measures to deal with failures. These measures should allow continued access to main services during disruptions and maintain acceptable service levels, even under stress, for the essential operational capabilities of the network. The goals should be to fail safely and recover quickly, so that faults and adverse conditions do not impact critical services and prioritized applications. To be able to deliver such resilience, 6G needs to recognize anomalies and adapt proactively. This requires self-awareness of the network state, identification and prediction of potential failures, reconfiguration capabilities as well as the ability to learn from the past and self-optimize for improved resilience.
Such dynamic adaptation capabilities necessitate automated security, a main tenet of the Zero Trust Architecture’s “never trust, always verify” approach. This requires continuous monitoring and verification with holistic, situational insights into network assets and operations, driven by dynamic policies for continuous verification of identities as well as fine-grained and contextual access control. Automation of security is also essential for predictive threat detection and active response. Achieving 6G dynamic security will, further, require proactive compliance and security assurance through threat intelligence, detection and hunting. This, in turn, requires automated security compliance testing and predictive runtime attack.
Last but by no means least, a crucial 6G characteristic is embedded sustainability. Many of the security characteristics detailed above will bring additional computational and communication burdens, which have energy and environmental implications. Lightweight cryptography algorithms, energy-aware selection of security features, or lean security solutions can contribute to environmental sustainability goals. There are also societal aspects to sustainability that are critical requirements for the success of 6G, thereby mandating, amongst others, trustworthy and responsible use of AI technology with fairness, transparency and robustness. Among the most important requirements are compliance with regulatory frameworks around data protection and privacy preservation and alignment with ethical guidelines and societal values.
