Abstract

The roles of trust, security and privacy are somewhat interconnected, but different facets of next generation networks. The challenges in creating a trustworthy 6G involve multidisciplinary spanning technology, regulation, techno-economics, politics and ethics. This white paper addresses their fundamental research challenges in three key areas:

Trust: Under the current “open Internet” regulation, the telco cloud can only be used for trust services equally for all users. The 6G network must support embedded trust for increased levels of information security in 6G. Trust modeling, trust policies and trust mechanisms need to be defined. 6G interlinks the physical and digital worlds making safety dependent on information security. Therefore, we need trustworthy 6G.

Security: In the 6G era, the dependence of the economy and societies on IT and networks will deepen. The role of IT and the networks in national security will continue to rise—which is a continuation of what we see in 5G. The development towards cloud and edge native infrastructures is expected to continue in 6G networks, and we need holistic 6G network security architecture planning. Security automation opens new questions: machine learning can be used to make safer systems, but also more dangerous attacks. Physical layer security techniques can also represent efficient solutions for securing less investigated network segments as a first line of defense.

Privacy: There is currently no way to unambiguously determine when linked, deidentified datasets cross the threshold to become personally identifiable. This is a major, unaddressed problem for many digital technologies in different sectors. Courts in different parts of the world are making decisions about whether privacy is being infringed without formal measures of the level of personal information, while companies are seeking new ways to exploit private data to create new business revenues. As solution alternatives, we may consider blockchain, distributed ledger technologies and differential privacy approaches.