Overview of the security and trust mechanisms in the 5GZORRO project

Abstract

In the evolution from 5G to beyond 5G networks, new business models are emerging where multi-domain and multistakeholder scenarios will play a paramount role as enablers. In these scenarios, the automated management of the services with minimal human intervention, also known as zero-touch management, is a pivotal requirement to ensure a proper functioning and to enable real-time responses to possible incidents or scalability needs. Nonetheless, these new scenarios and requirements also introduce new security risks that entail a complex threat landscape for beyond 5G networks. Hence, zero-touch management demands new solutions capable of securely controlling network resources into end-to-end scenarios distributed in multiple domains. In this vein, several challenges arise and need to be addressed, such as integrity, non-repudiation, confidentiality, security, and trust. Therefore, the H2020 5GZORRO project proposes new security and trust solutions for multi-domain and multi-stakeholder scenarios in 5G and beyond networks. To deal with the utmost importance security and trust challenges, we introduce different modules to mitigate them, namely, integrity and non-repudiation through Distributed Ledger Technologies, decentralized identity through an Identity and Permission Manager, end-to-end trustworthy relationships via a Trust Management Framework, secure workloads across different tenants and stakeholders via Trusted Execution Environment Security Management, detection and response to internal vulnerabilities and attacks via Network Monitoring, and on-demand secure cross-domain connections via VPN-as-a-Service. Therefore, the built security and trust 5GZORRO mechanisms form a secure environment with zero-touch automation capabilities, minimizing human intervention.