Guest Editorial: Trust, Security and Privacy of 6G

With 5G adoption for commercial use, researchers and practitioners have engaged into exploring 6G telecommunication technologies. In early 2020, they specified 6G basic concepts, perspectives, proposals and suggestions in a number of white papers, including the one about 6G trust, security and privacy (TSP) [1]. 6G is expected to offer the 6th sense. It follows the footsteps of 5G and pursues the integration of communications and sensing. Through sensing the physical world and human-beings, 6G should be capable of programming to offer automation systems that span a rich variety of devices, several types of network and communication technologies and humans. Thus theoretically, 6G should timely offer user expected and satisfied networking services for social communications, health, logistic, entertainment, business, and so on. It will embrace emerging technologies, such as quantum communication, molecular communication, real-time intelligent edge, Internet of everything, etc. As a consequence, personal and national safety will highly depend on network and information security. Anticipating future development, ITU-T specifies that Trustworthy Networking should be provided [2]. 6G TSP white paper [1] also indicates that trust should be embedded into networking. On the other hand, security is always a mandatory requirement, which is one of key performance indicators of trust. But sensing human-beings and physical world brings serious concern on privacy preservation, which however, conflicts with trust. All above drives us to pursue a trust management solution for trustworthy networking in 6G, which should ensure security and overcome privacy leakage in an integrated way.