A Survey of Technologies for Building Trusted Networks

In the current generation of networks, there has been a strong focus on security and integrity. In sixth-generation (6G) networks trust will also be an important requirement, but how do we build trust in a network? Many researchers have started to pay attention to this, but research in this field is still at an early stage. Taking our lead from the development of trusted computing for single devices we require a root of trust and a mechanism for reliably measuring and reporting on the state of the network. In this paper, we survey existing technologies that we feel can be used to achieve this. We explore trusted computing technologies that enable a single device to be trusted and suggest how they can be adapted to help build a trusted network. For reporting, we need a mechanism to immutably store measurements on the system. We consider that distributed ledger technologies could fulfil this role as they offer immutability, decentralised consensus, and transparency.