Building sustainable cybersecurity in the 6G ecosystem
Cybersecurity is extremely important for any functioning society, and recent global events have further scaled up its significance. But cybersecurity technologies must also be sustainable. VTT’s new SUNSET-6G project evaluates the sustainability of these technologies from many different angles.
6G networks will be highly distributed and decentralized much like a mesh of self-organized autonomous networks working in unison. Since the 6G wireless systems target to meet the needs of emerging services with unnoticeable latency, unlimited bandwidth, and fool proof security, for instance, having the network control physically in the vicinity of such services will be adopted.
In a digitally immersive world, for example metaverse where physical, human, and digital realities are intertwined, limitations in latency, bandwidth and security should be carefully addressed. Bandwidth and latency limitations can be overcome, thanks to huge research efforts in terahertz and ultra-reliable low latency communications.
However, security requires more than the current directions. The next generation network security procedures and approaches must be distributed and decentralized, unlike the existing centralized approaches. The SUNSET-6G network strives to achieve that.
The distribution of virtualized network functions has already begun, such as pushing certain network functions to the edge, and thus, distributed network control, far edge and edge beyond MEC, requires distributed security. Similarly, novel 6G applications and use-cases require extremely spontaneous security decision-making, which will not be possible with centralized architectures. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become central to the very function of novel networking and management systems and functions.
Since traditional or centralized AI has a wide range of challenges, distributed AI such as Federated Learning (FL) requires distributed security in contrast to the existing security approaches. All these challenges sum up to a major challenge of sustainability that is mostly overlooked in research and development, i.e., sustainability of security technologies, systems, and approaches.
The SUNSET-6G project is carried out in cooperation with prominent industrial partners with vast relevant experience in the cybersecurity domain: WithSecure, Nokia, Satel and Eficode. This makes the SUNSET-6G a very valuable project.
The SUNSET-6G (Sustainable Network Security Technologies for 6G) project is a three-year Business Finland funded research project, under the 6G-Bridge program. All the research will be performed at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. The project is led by Dr. Ijaz Ahmad.
Journal Article
Suomalainen, Jani, Ijaz Ahmad, Anu Shajan, and Timo Savunen. “Cybersecurity for Tactical 6G Networks: Threats, Architecture, and Intelligence.” Future Generation Computer Systems 162 (2023).