Edge and 6G: Cybersecurity Challenges

Part of the Trust in Digital Life Webinar Series 2025

The webinar focused on cybersecurity challenges related to edge computing and 6G, with panellists discussing issues of trust, interoperability and privacy in multi-access edge computing (MEC) environments. Key topics included establishing trust in dynamic and heterogeneous ecosystems, addressing security concerns in automated deployment methods, and the importance of standards in enabling interoperability and market growth. The panellists emphasised the need for further research and development in areas such as dynamic assessment, runtime verification and AI applications, while also highlighting the importance of business aspects and collaboration with open source communities in driving the success of MEC technologies.

Cybersecurity Challenges in Multi-Access Edge Computing

Claire Vishik, TDL Strategic Advisor, introduced the topic of cybersecurity in multi-access edge computing (MEC) and its significance in conjunction with anticipated 6G opportunities. She then invited Dario Sabella, Ioannis Kronitiris, and Alex Reznik to share their perspectives on the most important cybersecurity challenges in MEC. They talked about several issues including trust and interoperability, key applications, main challenges and short and medium term timeline for MEC developments. The three panellists are active participants in ETSI MEC and Dario Sabella is the current chair of the standardization effort and thus the issue of standards was approached from several angles. The panellists also identified potential connections with 6G that will be further clarified as 6G specifications develop.

AI Models, Trust and Data Integrity

The challenges of trusting physical infrastructure at the edge and the need to increase the focus on the business issues associated with the deployment were also debated along with the role of AI and complexities LLMs bring to edge systems and their security models.

Establishing Trust in Dynamic Environments

The discussion revolved around the challenges of establishing trust in a dynamic environment, defining and preserving privacy and examining associated trust models when even the definitions of trust remain fuzzy.

MEC Challenges

The challenges specific to MEC in the context of cyber physical systems and resilience formed another topic of conversation. The heterogeneity of stakeholders involved in edge infrastructure, including the edge computing service providers, application service providers and the network operator is difficult to model, plan, and implement. The need for mutual trust among participants in these architectures and the importance of security measures such as authentication, verification of application provenance and data management retain their importance. The need for compliance with different rules and regulations in various countries continues to grow in complexity and require significant resources. The ongoing work on the security monitoring and management (SMM) system for MEC and the API gateway for client applications will contribute to solving some of these problems..

Moving Beyond R&D and Finding a Killer Application

What key features can help produce killer applications? The panellists mentioned several options, such as development of dynamic assessment and runtime verification of services and software, composable attestation for services, areas requiring low latency (video processing or vehicle automation) areas like video processing and vehicular automation. Security solutions for multi device environments like MEC still need more research.

Emphasising Standards in Rapidly Developing Technologies

Standards are necessary in environments like MEC, but other equalizing approaches, like open source, are also important. MEC is access agnostic and is working towards opening up the network infrastructure to application developers and content providers. Collaboration with open source communities, such as CAMARA, and ETSI software development groups OpenCAPIF^[1] (SDG-OCF) and TeraFlowSDN (SDG-TFS), will help adoption of standards.

[1] Open source Common API Framework

To watch the full recording of the session, tune into TDL's video channel.