Security-Enhanced Network Slicing Towards 6G

Network slicing is a promising technology for commercial and public institution services (e.g., government, financial, military, and so on) that enables the creation of multiple independent networks on top of a shared physical infrastructure by virtualization. However several potential threats have been raised in network slicing such as inter-network slice isolation, trustworthiness for intra-network slice, privacy exposure, and quantum computer-based attacks, which are critical considering the security requirements to protect network slicing services in the 6G era. In this paper, we argue that by leveraging security-related service attributes including Remote Attestation (RATS) for Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) and Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) we can provide Security-Enhanced Network Slicing (SE-NS), which supports three main security services: (1) internetwork slice isolation in terms of security context; (2) RATS-based technique to provide trustworthiness of intra-network slice; and (3) PQC-based encryption of network slice identifier to protect privacy. Based on our prototype implementation, we argue that SE-NS successfully orchestrates network resources and the use of PQC will enable improved security and privacy in network slicing towards next-generation communication systems.