The roles of trust, security and privacy are somewhat interconnected, but different facets of next generation networks. The challenges in creating a trustworthy 6G are multidisciplinary, spanning technology, regulation, techno-economics, politics and ethics. This white paper addresses fundamental research challenges in three key areas – trust, security and privacy.

Trust: Under the current “open internet” regulation, the telco cloud can be used for trust services only equally for all users. The future 6G network must support embedded trust for increased level of information security in 6G. Trust modeling, trust policies and trust mechanisms need to be defined. 6G interlinks physical and digital worlds making safety dependent on information security. Therefore, we need a trustworthy 6G.

Security: In the 6G era, the dependence of the economy and societies on IT and networks will deepen. Their role in national and international security keeps rising as a continuation of what we see in 5G. The development towards cloud and edge native infrastructures is expected to continue in 6G networks, and we need holistic 6G network security architecture planning. Security automation, on the other hand, opens new questions. Machine learning can be used to make safer systems, but it also enables increasingly dangerous attacks. Physical layer security techniques can also represent efficient solutions for securing less investigated network segments as a first line of defense.

Privacy: There is currently no means to unambiguously determine when linked, deidentified datasets cross the threshold of becoming personally identifiable. This is a major, unaddressed problem for many digital technologies in different sectors. Courts in different parts of the world are making decisions about whether privacy is being infringed without formal measures of the level of personal information, while companies are seeking new ways to exploit private data to create new business revenues. As solution alternatives, we may consider blockchain, distributed ledger technologies and differential privacy approaches.

List of Contributors

Editor in Chief

• Mika Ylianttila, Centre for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu, Finland

Section Editors

• Raimo Kantola, Department of Communications and Networking, Aalto University, Finland
• Andrei Gurtov, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Linköping University, Sweden
• Lorenzo Mucchi, Department of Information Engineering, University of Florence, Italy
• Ian Oppermann, NSW Government Australia, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

Section Contributors

• Zheng Yan, Department of Communications and Networking, Aalto University, Finland
• Tri Hong Nguyen, Centre for Ubiquitous Computing, University of Oulu, Finland
• Fei Liu, Singapore Research Center, Huawei International
• Tharaka Hewa, Centre for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu, Finland
• Madhusanka Liyanage, University College Dublin, Ireland
• Ahmad Ijaz, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd, Finland
• Juha Partala, Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis, University of Oulu, Finland
• Robert Abbas, Macquarie university, Australia
• Artur Hecker, Huawei Technologies Munich Research Center, Germany
• Sara Jayousi, Department of Information Engineering, University of Florence, Italy
• Alessio Martinelli, Department of Information Engineering, University of Florence, Italy
• Stefano Caputo, Department of Information Engineering, University of Florence, Italy
• Jonathan Bechtold, WIOsense GmbH & Co. KG, Bremen, Germany
• Iván Morales, WIOsense GmbH & Co. KG, Bremen, Germany
• Andrei Stoica, WIOsense GmbH & Co. KG, Bremen, Germany
• Giuseppe Abreu, Jacobs University Bremen, Bremen, Germany
• Shahriar Shahabuddin, Mobile Networks, Nokia, Oulu, Finland
• Erdal Panayirci, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey
• Harald Haas, University of Edinburgh, UK
• Tanesh Kumar, Centre for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu, Finland
• Basak Ozan Ozparlak, Ozyegin University Faculty of Law Istanbul, Turkey
• Juha Röning, Biomimetics and Intelligent Systems Group, University of Oulu, Finland