Next generation 6G networks are designed to meet the requirements of modern applications, including the need for higher bandwidth and ultra-low latency services. While these networks show significant potential to fulfill these evolving connectivity needs, they also bring new challenges, particularly in the area of security. Meanwhile, ensuring the privacy is paramount in 6G network development, demanding robust solutions following “privacy-by-design” principles. To address these challenges, PRIVATEER project strengthens existing security mechanisms, introducing privacy-centric enablers tailored for 6G networks. This work, evaluates key enablers within PRIVATEER, focusing on the development and acceleration of AI -driven anomaly detection models, as well as attestation mechanisms for both hardware accelerators and containerized applications.

Cyber Situational Awareness (CSA) is an important element in both cyber security and cyber defence to inform processes and activities on strategic, tactical, and operational level. Furthermore, CSA enables informed decision making. The ongoing digitization and interconnection of previously unconnected components and sectors equally affects the civilian and military sector. In defence, this means that the cyber domain is both a separate military domain as well as a cross-domain and connecting element for the other military domains comprising land, air, sea, and space. Therefore, CSA must support perception, comprehension, and projection of events in the cyber space for persons with different roles and expertise. This paper introduces NEWSROOM, a research initiative to improve technologies, methods, and processes specifically related to CSA in cyber defence. For this purpose, NEWSROOM aims to improve methods for attacker behavior classification, cyber threat intelligence (CTI) collection and interaction, secure information access and sharing, as well as human computer interfaces (HCI) and visualizations to provide persons with different roles and expertise with accurate and easy to comprehend mission- and situation-specific CSA. Eventually, NEWSROOM’s core objective is to enable informed and fast decision-making in stressful situations of military operations. The paper outlines the concept of NEWSROOM and explains how its components can be applied in relevant application scenarios.

EVOLVE is a pan European Innovation Action that aims to fully-integrate High-Performance-Computing (HPC) hardware with state-of-the-art software technologies under a unique testbed, that enables the convergence of HPC, Cloud and Big-Data worlds and increases our ability to extract value from massive and demanding datasets. EVOLVE's advanced compute platform combines HPC-enabled capabilities, with transparent deployment in high abstraction level, and a versatile Big-Data processing stack for end-to-end workflows. Hence, domain experts have the potential to improve substantially the efficiency of existing services or introduce new models in the respective domains, e.g., automotive services, bus transportation, maritime surveillance and others. In this paper, we describe EVOLVE's testbed, and evaluate the performance of the integrated pilots from different domains.

EVOLVE is a pan-European Innovation Action building a converged infrastructure to bring together the HPC, Cloud, and Big Data worlds. EVOLVE's platform and software stack supports large-scale, data-intensive applications, driven primarily by industry requirements set by pilot and proof-of-concept use cases from diverse fields. Given the unprecedented data growth we are experiencing, EVOLVE's infrastructure is key in enabling the cost-effective processing of massive amounts of data and the adaptation of multiple high-end technologies, in an environment that fosters interoperability and enforces increased security.

SHIELD is an EU-funded project, targeting at the design and development of a novel cybersecurity framework, which offers security-as-a-Service in an evolved telco environment. The SHIELD framework leverages NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) and SDN (Software-Defined Networking) for virtualization and dynamic placement of virtualised security appliances in the network (virtual Network Security Functions - vNSFs), Big Data analytics for real-time incident detection and mitigation, as well as attestation techniques for securing both the infrastructure and the services. This papers discusses key use cases and requirements for the SHIELD framework and presents a high-level architectural approach.

One of the primary challenges associated with network functions virtualization (NFV) is the automated management of the service lifecycle. In this paper, we present a full software-based management and orchestration (MANO) stack which operates with OpenStack and OpenDaylight controllers and has the in-built functionality to automate the key phases of the NFV service lifecycle, namely resource discovery and matching, service mapping, service deployment, and monitoring. The MANO stack is being implemented by the EU FP7 project T-NOVA, with the components being released as open-source software. Service mapping and service deployment solutions developed in the scope of T-NOVA are presented in detail. As a proof-of-concept, we evaluate the performance of a virtualized traffic classifier network function, demonstrating the gains of virtualized hardware acceleration.

While the explicit provision of Network Awareness to applications towards QoE optimisation has attracted significant attention during the past decade, very few solutions have been proposed which can be considered both feasible and scalable. Towards this direction, this paper proposes a framework which implements a Network Cost Service, explicitly providing the “network cost” between two or more network nodes as well as the a priori QoE estimation for a specific application - with the aim of assisting QoE-based optimization of current and emerging communication paradigms, such as peer-to-peer communication, distributed caching, information-centric networking and in-network cloud services. The proposed framework has been fully implemented, assessed and released as open-source for further experimentation. Large-scale deployment considerations and open research issues are also discussed.

Active network monitoring techniques have been traditionally used in network management frameworks for OAM operations. They can also provide vital end-to-end network status information which can be exploited for application optimization (Network-Aware Applications). The paper proposes a novel, standards-compliant management framework for conducting active measurements on DiffServ networks, solely based on SNMP as control protocol. A specialized SNMP agent (SNMP for Active Measurements - SAM) is introduced for this purpose, accompanied with a custom MIB, which utilizes the standardized OWAMP (One-Way Active Measurement Protocol) for establishing active measurement sessions. A proof-of-concept implementation deployed on a laboratory testbed shows that the proposed framework exhibits satisfactory accuracy and scalability, while at the same time being compatible with off-the-shelf SNMP-based network managers. The SAM framework has been released as open-source for Linux-based routers.

This paper presents a preliminary implementation of a content-aware network node as part of a Content-Aware capable network infrastructure. The proposed network node facilitates all the possible functions provided by an ordinary router or gateway while at the same time exploits flow- and content- awareness in order to identify the content carried within a flow and handle it efficiently. In this context this paper discusses the main concepts and operating principles around the flow and content awareness and presents a preliminary implementation, build around the Linux operating system.

Creation and efficient distribution of new rich media services is foreseen to play a key role in the Future Internet. Emerging FI architectures should be able to fully support and facilitate all kinds of current and future media-oriented applications. The architecture illustrated in this paper facilitates the deployment of an integrated Media Ecosystem, where all users can efficiently not only have access to, but also compose and share rich media services. This is achieved via a mesh of intelligent, media-centric home gateways (“HomeBoxes”), which utilize novel Content-Aware network overlays, developed on top of the existing transport infrastructures. This concept has been designed and is being implemented as an international pilot demonstrator in the frame of the EU-funded ICT project ALICANTE.