6G Ready – Security and Trust

With the organic extension of the network towards third party infrastructures two new attack surfaces need to be secured:

• Software networks interface towards the infrastructure – the software programs need to trust the infrastructure on their own processing, especially against side attacks from parallel software or vulnerabilities in the infrastructure software
• Mutual trust between different parts of the network placed that are meshed together – as any distribution, the distribution of the network functions across different network locations with different administration requires new mechanisms to authentication and to authorize the communication. 

To be able to secure these two interfaces there is a need for developing new security information creation, distributed and storage such as the generalized key distribution across the 6G network mesh for infrastructure nodes as well as for software components. This is specifically challenging due to potential interruptions of connectivity and due to the very large number of network functions deployed on top of the multi-administrated environment.