Securing Edge Devices in IoT and 6G: A Trust-Based Approach for Resource-Constrained Environments

The widespread use of the Internet and the rapid growth of edge devices have increased the cyber-attack surface for these devices in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Attackers target edge devices due to their widespread use as essential components of daily life, driven by the Internet of Things (IoT) revolution and the 6G ecosystem. Protecting these devices from cyber attacks is crucial, given their limited storage, processing capabilities, and battery resources. Additional challenges include diversity, the swift development of numerous devices, and hardware trust issues. Existing security solutions are ill-suited for the resource-constrained environments (RCE) of IoT and 6G. This article conducts a comprehensive analysis of the applicability of cyber attacks in RCE and identifies attacks across four layers of the IoT protocol stack. This study reveals that 82% of application-layer attacks can be detected through network traffic analysis. Secondly, the technical requirements for trust architectures, models, modules, parameters, key technologies, and applications are presented. Third, a review of recently proposed trust management solutions, considering trust modules, is presented. In this context, 95% of the schemes address trust composition, while 58% focus on the trust propagation module, highlighting the need for effective trust management solutions to address these challenges. Additionally, this article analyzes the principles of Zero-Trust Architecture (ZTA) for resource-constrained devices. Furthermore, future research directions and open challenges for designing such solutions are also identified.