Confidential Computing and Privacy-preserving Technologies for 6G

6G infrastructures must ensure reliability, trust and resilience on a globally connected continuum of heterogeneous environments supported by the convergence of networks and IT systems to enable new future digital services. The substantial increase of coverage and network heterogeneity, raises severe concerns that 6G security and privacy can be worse than the previous generations. The 6G network should be a deep integration of emerging AI tools, new hardware components and accelerators, compute and networking functions, IoT and edge nodes. Contemporary security is not designed for serving a massive number of connected and high-mobility heterogeneous devices. CONFIDENTIAL6G emphasizes on privacy preservation and security of sensitive data by focusing on protection of data:

• In use. This is an unsolved issue with solutions just emerging with Confidential Computing.

• In transit. CONFIDENTIAL6G will enhance communication protection with post-quantum cryptography, blockchain technologies and secure data access control and traceability platforms.

• At the Edge. CONFIDENTIAL6G will work on specifying the post-quantum cryptographic approach most appropriate to cater for constrained Edge and IoT devices. Additionally, in order to avoid data movement from the Edge and increase trust and security, Federated AI/ML will be researched.

CONFIDENTIAL6G will base its research on 3 pillars: Post-quantum cryptography, Confidential Computing and Confidential Communication. CONFIDENTIAL6G will test and validate the developed solutions in three use cases: 1) Predictive maintenance for airline consortium using blockchain-based data sharing platform and federated AI/ML orchestration, 2) Privacy-preserving confidential computing platform that enables mitigation of internal threats for telecom cloud providers and 3) Intelligent connected vehicle, mission-critical services, OTA updates, FL/ML and vehicle to infrastructure communication.