Extending Orchestration for Privacy Preservation in Beyond 5G and 6G Networks

The next generation of mobile networks are anticipated relying on data to deliver new services, simplify operations and maintenance but their openness will encourage more stakeholders to participate in designing network services, slice preparation, operations, and infrastructure provisioning. From the perspective of customers’ personal and network data, these advancements become security and privacy concerns as it becomes more challenging to control how this data is consumed and secured. In this position paper, we propose a multifaceted architecture for storing, communicating and consuming sensitive data across network slices. Our approach covers (i) the supervision of security and privacy mechanisms to improve the security posture of network slices (ii) the integration of advanced privacy-enhancing techniques into the network orchestration to prevent information leaks during cross-slice resource operations, and (iii) devising a privacy-preserving access control between slices to adequately control the information flow. We provide a reference architecture for our approach and justify it through a set of scenarios corresponding to a realistic use case, demonstrating its applicability and effectiveness in practical environments.