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.

Cybersecurity technologies protect our digital assets, ranging from personal digital belongings to societal and state level digital belongings, and their connectivity. This is all crucial for our society and therefore it is natural to assume that there should be no dearth of resources for ensuring it. However, the sustainability of cybersecurity is also extremely important, but rarely discussed.

For example, all resources should not be concentrated on certain types of threats, leaving no resources for protection from other kinds of threats. A balanced approach should be adopted, where protection from all threats at the same time is always possible with existing computing, memory, and spectrum resources. Furthermore, security is also an enabler of sustainability, since efficient security ensures that resources are used only for legitimate purposes. Therefore, the SUNSET-6G project investigates sustainable cybersecurity approaches in the 6G ecosystem. Sustainability of security technologies is evaluated in terms of energy, spectrum, processing, and memory, as well as human resources.  

The Team

The project team consists of highly experienced experts from VTT.