Other than simply inheriting vulnerabilities from the previous generations, 6G will face new threat vectors, including in the radio and massive Internet of things (IoT) domains. The COST Action 6G-PHYSEC will thus focus on creating a European network of academia and industry experts that helps the development of trustworthy and resilient 6G that can instill trust, secure communications and privacy by proposing novel physical layer security (PLS) solutions.
The premise of 6G-PHYSEC is that in 6G, intelligent and adaptive security controls are needed at all layers, with adaptation enabled by the distillation of semantics and context. The focus of this Action is on exploiting the characteristics of physical phenomena to provide security functionalities; PLS can complement upper-layer security schemes to strengthen the overall system security and enhance trust. The Action will study the characteristics of different physical environments and hardware properties to develop efficient methods to authenticate users and devices and to provide key-based or keyless confidentiality schemes. This Action will also investigate the interplay between PLS and advances in artificial intelligence, joint communication and sensing, semantic communications and context awareness.
To enhance the trustworthiness of 6G, starting from the physical and hardware layers, 6G-PHYSEC forms a large network of internationally renowned experts in wireless communications and security, from both academia and industry. The Action has also involved researchers across the whole of Europe and has included distinguished international partners with established expertise. The Action promotes inclusiveness by welcoming the participation of young researchers and female researchers in particular.
Trustworthiness
Resilience
This group will work on the trustworthiness of the 6G system. The Action further creates three subgroups to focus on three important topics: security, trust, and privacy. This Action will involve not only physical layer investigators but also cryptographers and network investigators to the joint efforts, to provide a complete security framework at all layers.
The main objective of this Working Group is to investigate methods to improve the resilience of the systems to diverse attacks in 6G networks. More importantly, this Action will learn intensively how to utilize AI and emerging technologies such as JC&S and IRSs to enable an intelligent secure 6G.
This Working Group will learn and develop quantum-resistant PLS schemes and efficient lightweight solutions. In addition, this Action will also investigate the utilization of different security schemes adaptively to provide proper quantum resistance guarantees.
This group will study different aspects of system design to enable scalability and sustainability in addition to security. The group aims at investigating from hardware to software design, signal processing algorithms, and protocols to provide low-cost low complexity, and energy-efficient solutions.
This Working Group will bridge the theoretical group to realworld solutions. They will work back-and-forth with the latter to provide a realistic framework for the security. They will also demonstrate security concepts at conferences, workshops, and exhibitions to attract the attention from both industry and end users.