6G Trustworthiness: Requirements, Challenges, and Considerations
Tuesday, 3 June 2025, 9:00 – 12:30, room 0.A
Organisers:
- Mir Ghoraishi (Gigasys Solutions, )
- Antonio Skarmeta (Univ. Murcia, ES)
Motivation and Background
6G network infrastructure must support current and envision ned use cases and be able to adapt to new technologies and be resilient to new attack vectors. A 6G mobile network should be trusted to deliver these use cases across several trustworthiness aspects including security, privacy, reliability, resilience, and safety. Trustworthiness is related to the ability to mitigate the security risks in the mobile network. Even though the above mentioned five aspects are considered in the design phase of the mobile network, the trustworthiness of the mobile network system is mostly dependent on implementation and configuration.
When the five dimensions of trustworthiness are applied, a common practice should be followed to ensure the robustness of the mobile network while at the same time, consistent monitoring and assessment is also required to enhance the trustworthiness.
This workshop is proposed by 9 SNS projects: ROBUST6G, NATWORK, PRIVATEER, SAFE-6G, iTrust6G, MARE, VERGE, CONFIDENTIAL6G, and RIGOROUS, plus 6G Platform Germany, and is co-organized by 6G-IA Security Working Group. Their representatives in the event will be sharing their views, achievements, and lessons learnt from their respective projects. The holistic framework to orchestrate and assess the security, and the methodologies to set the trustworthiness targets, and the current state of the art fuelled by the insights from the SNS JU projects will be introduced.
The collected insights from these activities published in a recently released white paper by the Security WG will be presented in a dedicated session. In addition, a distinguished keynote speaker representing German national 6G Platform project will provide their first-hand views on the topic. The expert panel discussion in the end of the day will provide further interaction and alignment on the issue, toward the conclusion and wrap up of the workshop. The organisers are committed to boost the dissemination of workshop conclusions and findings by bringing them into future activities that they organise on a regular basis.
Structure
09:00 – 10:30: Session 1
- Welcome and Introduction to the Workshop – Mir Ghoraishi, Gigasys Solutions, Antonio Skarmeta, Universidad de Murcia (10 min)
- Security Orchestration in 6G Networks, Antonio Skarmeta, Universidad de Murcia (20 mins)
This session will focus on the approaches taken to provide security orchestration management of the 6G network and how it is related to the level of trust aspects of the orchestration. The session will describe the usage of Policy-based security orchestration covering from the specification of the service to the final deployment based on a dynamic provisioning; Security orchestration framework for the end-to-end management of cyber-threat occurrence and exploitation, including CTI generation and consumption; and its interaction with detection and mitigation of security threats by i) real time threat detection and mitigation; ii) prediction and “what-if” scenario analysis through Network Digital Twins, (iii) intent-based and policy-based security orchestration or a modular and softwarised security strategy, turning into a set of security functions built upon composing basic primitives that would fit current and future 6G security demands. In general, the session will provide a broad vision of different solutions ongoing to enhance the provision of a E2E security orchestration solution. - Trustworthiness Assessment for 6G, Gunes Kesik, Ericsson (20 mins)
This presentation will explore critical challenges to support trustworthy, intelligent systems and present the latest advancements in security, privacy, and trustworthiness for 6G networks and innovative solutions from the SNS projects. Topics will include the cognitive coordination of trustworthiness and user-centric approaches for assessing and providing trustworthy networks, as well as the use of AI-assisted methods to evaluate levels of trustworthiness and automate network provisioning. Decentralized security and trust management frameworks, alongside AI-based anomaly detection, will be discussed as key enablers for resilient 6G systems. Presentations will highlight methods to secure AI-based models against adversarial attacks, ensure data privacy, and support the safe training and operation of AI. Advances in privacy-preserving federated learning frameworks, secure multi-party computation, and homomorphic encryption will also be explored, with a focus on energy-efficient machine learning architectures and the adoption of Explainable AI for threat detection and defense mechanisms. Finally, the workshop will address the privacy and security of sensitive data through post-quantum cryptography, confidential computing, and secure communication methods, ensuring the protection of data in use, in transit, and at the edge. This session will provide valuable insights into the development of secure, privacy-preserving, and trustworthy 6G networks to meet the evolving needs of global industries and critical systems. - Remote Attestation for Highly Dynamic 6G Systems, Shuaib Siddiqui, i2CAT (20 mins)
This session highlights advanced approaches to attestation for enhancing trust, security, and management in dynamic and distributed systems, particularly in 6G environments. It explores blockchain-based attestation mechanisms to ensure the integrity of heterogeneous infrastructures using immutable attestation evidence. A comprehensive trust evaluation and management framework is proposed, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and the Zero-Trust paradigm to address the challenges of highly dynamic 6G systems. Additionally, the integration of blockchain-based remote attestation with integrity freshness as a root of trust is examined, along with AI-powered smart contract validation, reinforcement learning-based blockchain governance, and robust access control mechanisms. These technologies collectively aim to establish secure, adaptive, and trustworthy infrastructures for next-generation networks. - Security Assessment in 6G Networks, Georgios Gardikis, Space Hellas (20 mins)
This session will leverage concepts and results from the MARE and NATWORK projects to underpin techniques for security assessment of 6G networks. This includes how Network Digital Twins (NDTs) can be leveraged, not only to identify vulnerabilities, predict potential attack vectors, and evaluate the impact of various threat scenarios within the unique multi-layered architecture of 5G, but also to sandbox security functions and orchestrated responses, towards evaluating their impact and efficiency. Advanced techniques will be explored, such as optimised explainable Moving Target Defence (MTD), as well as AI-driven penetration testing.
Coffee break
start – end: Session 2
- Keynote: Trustworthiness Requirements for 6G: A German Perspective on Charting the Path to Trustworthy Mobile Networks, Norman Franchi, Friedrich-Alexander-University (FAU) (20 mins)
Trustworthiness continues to be a widely used buzzword, often surrounded by ambiguity and lacking a universally clear definition. However, its importance has reached a pivotal point for Germany and the EU as it underpins a wide range of critical applications such as autonomous vehicles, healthcare, industrial automation, or energy networks. In this context, trustworthiness will be the foundation that allows German businesses to leverage the full potential of next-generation connectivity, ensuring competitive edge in global markets. And here it is important to determine what are the critical sectors that interact with 6G and what kinds of businesses trustworthiness is applied to. Additionally, it is essential to clarify what needs to be trusted: is it the infrastructure that underpins the network, the service running on it or the device that must be certified to meet trustworthiness-related standards. And here comes the role of certifications, regulations and how standardization can handle trustworthiness.
This talk will reflect the current work and perspective of the working group “Trustworthiness in 6G” of the 6G Platform Germany. Among others, the following questions will be raised and discussed:
- ○ How can we define trustworthy-by-design for 6G networks?
- ○ What to be trusted?
- ○ What types of businesses and sectors can trustworthiness be applied to?
- ○ What role do certifications and regulations play in ensuring trust?
- ○ 6G Platform Germany (non-SNS, German National Project
- Main Challenges and Requirements for Security of 6G Systems (White Paper highlights), Antonio Skarmeta, Universidad de Murcia (15 mins)
This presentation will focus on describing the main challenges identified on the white paper as part of the work already ongoing in the different projects and what are the innovation that are highlighted for the evolution of the security in 6G Architecture. - Physical Layer Security for 6G Networks, Antonios Lalas, CERTH/ITI: Centre for Research and Technology – Hellas / Information Technologies Institute (10 mins)
This presentation will introduce the main challenges related to Physical Layer Security (PLS) for 6G networks, as well as novel approaches to address these, along with challenging 6G use cases. For example, autonomous vehicles (AVs) will rely heavily on 6G networks for communication and coordination, making them vulnerable to jamming attacks that can disrupt communication and pose significant safety risks. This session introduces i) novel anti-jamming (AI-based jamming detection and mitigation) and resource management services (enhanced ML-based MIMO, RIS reconfiguration) for ensuring reliable and secure communication for AV networks; ii) novel PLS based security schemes for 6G leveraging mMIMO, RIS, dMIMO; iii) net-zero PHY machine learning and intrinsic security of AI; iv) AI-based physical layer key generation (PKG) techniques; v) low latency and low footprint authentication and key agreement protocols for 6G use cases. Moreover, PHY enabled trustworthiness and resilience are introduced, including i) localization privacy; ii) trustworthy sensing; iii) generalized anomaly detection collecting alerts from the physical and hardware layers.
Panel Discussion: on 6G Trustworthiness: Requirements, Challenges, and Considerations, (45 min)
Panelists:
- Antonio Skarmeta (University of Murcia)
- Norman Franchi (Friedrich-Alexander-University)
- Gunes Kesik (Ericsson)
- Georgios Gardikis (Space Hellas)
- Harilaos Koumaras (Demokritos)
- Shuaib Siddiqui (i2CAT)
- Antonios Lalas (CERTH/ITI)
