Reliable Services and Smart Security–Standardisation and Follow-up/PoCs -

The target outcomes address consolidation of results on:

• AI technology applied to security and service deployment in different aspects: i) secure and verifiable application of AI to enhanced service deployment in 6G; ii) consideration of potential security threats using AI; (trusted by people, systems and processes) AI for securing 6G control and management planes; to efficiently improve the security of distributed architectures and complex use environments.
• Beyond perimetric security strategies and disruptive security and reliability scenarios, including energy efficiency aspects. Holistic distribution of security in all its phases (protection, detection, response), with a particular focus on differentiated security architectures and cooperative security across domains, layers and stakeholders.
• Availability accessibility, and affordability of technologies supporting the necessary levels of trustworthiness, resilience, openness, transparency, and dependability expected under the EU regulations (such as GDPR and Cyber Security Act) across a complete service continuum, supporting complex human centric multimodal communications, including entangled devices.
• Availability accessibility, and affordability of technologies ensuring secure, privacy preserving and trustworthy services in the context of a programmable platform for the complete life cycle of services, accessed by multi-stakeholders and tenants including vertical industries as users, for increasingly dynamic scenarios considering interdependencies between components and cascade effects that may be produced separately Zero-touch security deployment solutions for virtualized and distributed environments, taking into account the varying computational capabilities and security requirements of their building blocks and their interactions with third-party entities.
• Quantum key distribution and post-quantum cryptography support ensuring long term security for 6G networks.
• Efficient run-time service development methodologies able to operate across multiple stakeholders in an efficient way, to provide complex, multi-technology, dynamic services.
• Service technologies for time-sensitive and computationally intensive applications, able to optimize deployment considering aspects as energy consumption, reliability and security levels.
• Algorithms, software and hardware implementations where appropriate, which can be used for PoC and later trials systems Dissemination of solutions for international consensus building, which can be exploited in standardisation activities.
• Contributions to international standardisation.

Please refer to the "Specific Challenges and Objectives" section for Stream B in the Work Programme, available under ‘Topic Conditions and Documents - Additional Documents’.

The focus of this Strand is on several complementary issues mentioned below and applicants may select one or more of these issues.

• Exploitation of (distributed) trusted AI/ML for 6G infrastructures. The topic deals with frameworks that will provide security for the whole AI life to assure for models and behaviours predictability, including the AI development and deployment environments, AI models vulnerability quantification, understandable AI considerations and protection measures on AI misuse.
• Cooperative holistic E2E security and privacy solutions for 6G architectures, including, but not limited to, zero trust frameworks. Human-centric security and privacy solutions should be incorporated in these E2E architectures. The whole sequence of security phases should be considered from identification of threats, protection, detection, response towards recovery. Recovery will contribute to the resilience of Digital infrastructure and services. Secure host-neutral infrastructure where multiple infrastructure providers are involved is also in scope.
• Smart and trustworthy service frameworks, aiming at creating a comprehensive service marketplace with secure lifecycle management, ensuring continuous security assessment. 6G network security must be continuously assessed for end-to-end provable security. Various methodologies, such as security composition, differential deployment, and incremental evolution, are considered. Service frameworks encompass software aspects such as secure deployment and up-dates. These technologies should support collaboration among stakeholders, interoperation with different service run-time systems, and provide abstractions of security levels allowing integration and end-to-end composition.
• Efficient security and privacy enablers. This includes enablers for technologies as multi‐level Security; security segregation and spatial fragmentation; flexible profiling of 6G resources; privacy enhancing technologies; security and privacy quantification with relevant evaluation methodologies and means; Multi-stakeholder Moving Target Defence evolutions; fast and proactive security recovery techniques.
• Zero-touch integrated security deployment, considering virtualized environments and highly distributed infrastructures. In scope are: i) the design and implementation of ciphers that can adapt to varying computational resources, with overall security levels being efficiently achieved adequately including limitations from resource-constrained devices and environments; ii) mechanisms, potentially using AI, to isolate and harden third party Apps; iii) and mechanisms to limit the attack surface resulting from exposing network capabilities to external applications; iv) techniques to improve the reliability of disaggregated architectures implemented by multiple building blocks.
• Integration of secured 6G communications via Quantum key distribution and post-quantum cryptography support deals with ensuring long-term security for 6G networks in end-to-end network infrastructure, particularly considering 6G requirements. This includes the coexistence with optical communication networks, facing the related challenges, the design and evaluation of techniques to combat impairments of the quantum channel, as well as 6G security procedures for quantum secure protocols enhancement (e.g., in terms of secure key rate). In scope are also flexible and efficient quantum-safe solutions, which can be programmable by software, facilitating the applicability of QKD and an optimal resource usage, strengthening the security of 6G networks. The topic also addresses new software-defined networking architectures and functional requirements for classical channel and key joint management.
• Timing sensitive, and time responsive software and related hardware technologies for distributed, multi-stakeholder multi-system service provision. These technologies should intelligently incorporate different technologies across different service providers, dynamically managing service execution realisation across arbitrary levels of horizontal and vertical interoperability, and performing optimal adaptation to the physical constraints. On scope are also interfaces for customer or user-centric policies, and distributed computing technologies, able to implement operational realisations by establishing consensus according to different priorities (e.g., cost, reliability, code footprint), and trading off service cost in this runtime process.

The scope includes, where relevant, harmonisation/coordination with Member States or Associated countries 6G initiatives. Any produced PoCs should be implemented in a way that their integration in SNS WP2025-26 Stream C and/or Stream D project will be possible (e.g., open-source solutions, appropriate documentation, support after the completion of the project etc.).

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