Zero Trust Architecture for 6G Security

TL;DR

This paper proposes a software-defined zero trust architecture for 6G networks, aiming to enhance security in open, heterogeneous environments by adaptive control and preventing malicious behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces a novel zero trust architecture tailored for 6G, emphasizing adaptive control domains and demonstrating its effectiveness through simulation case studies.

Findings

Effective prevention of DDoS, malware, and zero-day exploits.

Demonstrated robustness and scalability of the proposed architecture.

Identified open issues for future development.

Abstract

The upcoming sixth generation (6G) network is envisioned to be more open and heterogeneous than earlier generations. This challenges conventional security architectures, which typically rely on the construction of a security perimeter at network boundaries. In this article, we propose a software-defined zero trust architecture (ZTA) for 6G networks, which is promising for establishing an elastic and scalable security regime. This architecture achieves secure access control through adaptive collaborations among the involved control domains, and can effectively prevent malicious access behaviors such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, malware spread, and zero-day exploits. We also introduce key design aspects of this architecture and show the simulation results of a case study, which shows the effectiveness and robustness of ZTA for 6G. Furthermore, we discuss open issues to further promote this new architecture.