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Trustworthy systems

A secure and trustworthy network platform

Trustworthy systems

Mobile networks are part of the critical infrastructure for society, industries, and consumers. On the journey towards the future, network capabilities will elevate to a level where the networks can fulfil the requirements of even the most mission and business critical use cases.

What is needed in an evolving security threat landscape?

Research leader Bengt Sahlin guides you through the three key components of a trustworthy system.

The use of networks to realize the Internet of Senses, connected intelligent machines, digitalized and programmable physical world, and connected sustainable world requires protection against the continuously evolving risk and threat landscape in the different phases of the supply chain and operations. Especially, on the operations side, seamless integration of security controls and assurance mechanisms for AI-based security and trust management is all the more crucial.
 
A secure, resilient, and privacy-preserving network platform is a cornerstone in supporting the most demanding society, mission and business critical use cases with proven performance, under harsh conditions, in a verifiable way. This requires built-in security automation and assurance capabilities for all deployment models and product lifecycle phases, including development, deployment, and operations of networks. Enhanced security and critical service assurance mechanisms together with AI-based security and trust management make it possible to respond in real time to known and unknown threats.

Trustworthy systems component

The trustworthy systems journey

The intelligent network platform offers security, privacy, reliability, availability, and robustness, to various degrees depending on the use cases. To realize these properties, different building blocks have been identified on the journey from 5G towards 6G.

Service availability

Increased focus on robustness, availability, and resilience of the 5G network platform supports new business and mission critical use cases. Take, for example, a factory - where disturbances in connectivity may cause production interruptions, and consequently, great financial impact. 

Breaking this down, we identify efficient and robust resource provisioning, automated network operations, and predictive network operations as key requirements of consumers and industries in the future.

Solutions built on confidential computing

Confidential computing will be an important enabling technology for security with systems becoming increasingly virtualized. It allows us to protect data as it is being processed and stored, providing assurance to both users and regulators. Confidential computing will also form a basis for secure identity management.

A long-term vision is that we will have automated trust assessment of all network elements, including nodes, devices, applications, and virtual resources in the cloud, rooted in trusted execution environments and with artificial intelligence based processing.

Secure identities and protocols

Secure identities are essential to protect communication at every layer between humans, devices, and applications across different industry segments. To enable secure communication, technologies that have been used throughout the mobile network generations, including protocol stacks, will continue to evolve. Examples are trusted identities and secure protocols, authentication frameworks, consent and access control management, and automated data governance. 

For example, trusted identities, unified identity, consent and access control management, and automated data governance. 

Security assurance and defense

Security automation and assurance mechanisms are essential for the development, deployment, and operations cycle. Present-day security assurance methodologies put a lot of focus on product security. Our long-term vision is that solutions will have built-in assurance and proof-of-compliance mechanisms, supporting communication service providers and their subscribers, assuring full compliance with security specifications, standards, and regulations. New tools, some of which will use AI capabilities for detecting threats and dynamically responding to them, will significantly enhance assurance in the future.

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Ever-present intelligent communication

A research outlook towards 6G.

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The 5G platform offers you a top-class resilient system that meets the requirements of all your mission and business critical processes, such as factory automation, remote control of assets, and more.

Resilient 5G systems