Zero Trust Architecture for 6G Security

The upcoming sixth generation (6G) network is expected to be more open and heterogeneous, posing new challenges to conventional security architectures. Traditionally, these architectures rely on the construction of a security perimeter at network boundaries. In this article, we propose a software-defined zero trust architecture (ZTA) for 6G networks, offering a promising approach to establish an elastic and scalable security regime. Our proposed architecture ensures secure access control through adaptive collaborations among control domains, effectively mitigating malicious access behaviors like distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, malware spread, and zero-day exploits. We also highlight key design aspects of this architecture and present simulation results from a case study that demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of ZTA for 6G. Finally, we discuss open issues that warrant further exploration to promote and enhance this novel architecture.