Toward 6G Security: Technology Trends, Threats, and Solutions

Toward 6G, we are witnessing various technology trends including network openness and open source SW-based mobile communication systems, network AI, privacy protection, virtualization and containerization, and quantum computing. These trends are expected to bring new security threats. The openness of network architecture and the wide adoption of open source may increase the attack surface in the system. An attacker may attempt to fool AI-based radio access network/core network to cause malfunction using adversarial machine learning (AML) techniques. Personalization technology in 6G also opens the door to fine-grained privacy invasion. Adoption of virtualization and containerization also introduces a new attack path, and introduction of quantum computing is expected to affect the security of existing cryptographic algorithms used in today's mobile networks. In this article, we analyze these potential new threats caused by the introduction of new technologies and present possible mitigation to address these threats.