A Security Services Management Architecture Toward Resilient 6G Wireless and Computing Ecosystems

The upcoming sixth-generation (6G) networks are expected to be more heterogeneous, scalable, reliable, secure and energy-efficient. 6G services and applications will benefit from the fast data transmission rates, global coverage, precise positioning, and widespread intelligence capabilities provided by 6G technology. In this complex scenario, new attack surfaces and vectors will emerge, due to the distributed, disaggregated, dynamic, programmable and open nature of the entire end-to-end 6G infrastructure along with the fragmentation of data, as well as the need for supporting cross-platforms interoperability, making the application of security and trust fundamentally challenging. To securely manage services in the future 6G mobile networks along with the set of functions ruling its management, conceptual work is needed to defining functional blocks supporting a secure end-to-end 6G systems management. This is especially critical in handling specific functionalities, such as network disaggregation, risk and threats business impact, energy-efficiency, self-configuration or dynamic discovery. This paper positions an innovative 6G security services management architecture, which builds on a set of innovative building blocks, leveraging key technologies, such as AI-assisted models and Digital Twin, while enabling a human-centric approach toward an end-to-end security solution. Two canonical workflows along with two illustrative application scenarios are proposed, Light Rail Transit and Extended Reality, to conceptually highlight the proposed architecture impact and its expected benefits when high bandwidth, ultra-low latency, and secure communications are required.