Title
A Trustworthy Platform for 6G Networks

Authors
Jana Eisoldt, Michael Roitzsch

Affiliation
Barkhausen Institut

Abstract
Our digital world is powered by highly distributed systems. Current (5G) and future (6G) mobile networks are prime examples. These networks consist of a multitude of components in both software and hardware, and not all of them can be considered trustworthy. Upcoming radio access network (RAN) architectures such as O-RAN begin to address this problem by making the RAN more independent of proprietary components. The goal is a modularized design to establish a heterogeneous, interoperable, and trustworthy architecture. At the same time, a 6G network is expected to bring calculations to the network edge and must therefore run distributed multi-tenancy workloads with challenging requirements for latency, throughput and energy efficiency. The development of a trustworthy system that meaningfully balances the requirements of such workloads and system security is a challenging task. Energy efficiency and low latency require close interaction of components, while safety and security require strong isolation. Privacy aspects like the ability of network base stations to sense the environment in a radar-like fashion add to the challenge. In this talk, we present the overall problem space of communication networks from a systems perspective. We then present the solution toolbox that we are currently applying, taking microkernel-based O-RAN deployments as primary example. Other techniques are capability-based component isolation, trusted-execution environments, and remote attestation. Our guiding principle is an isolation-by-default model on all system layers, while still maintaining energy efficiency, low latency, and scalability.