September 2024
Project Highlights
As summer draws to a close, we approach a significant milestone for RIGOUROUS — our 18th month of progress. This marks the completion of another key phase in the efforts to enhance 6G networks and is highlighted by several major deliverables. It’s also time for our periodic report, providing a comprehensive update on our journey so far.
First of all, the Call for Papers for the 2nd Workshop on Beyond current 5G Architecture for 6G Service and International Cooperation Workshop just ended on the past September 10th. The workshop is aimed at discussing the emerging 5G enablers towards holistically rethinking 6G to understand the Challenges, Opportunities & Standardization Imperatives and define the way forward and immediate next steps to ensure ubiquitous adoption of 6G globally, being supported by EU SNS projects RIGOUROUS, HORSE, 6GSOC, and 6GCloud.
Now onto the main topic of this newsletter!
Our Progress So Far
During the first 18 months, the project has defined a methodology for collecting and defining the high-level requirements, defining the first architecture of RIGOUROUS, including the main functional blocks, workflows, and services as well as the use cases and threat scenarios specifications. The project has devised, designed, and implemented the first proof of concept implementations of the enablers and assets being investigated for coming up with a Multi-domain model-based automated security orchestration, trust management, and deployment.
In addition, the project has delivered the first results of the innovative AI-powered mechanisms to enable federated cross-domain analytics for anomaly detection (With privacy protection and resilience to adversarial attacks), dynamic and automated service composition mechanisms which are based on a hybrid scheme combining AI with rules-based systems, to detect and resolve the interconnection problems (interoperability and/or security, privacy and trust mismatches) among components that are attempting to interoperate, and which are not known in advance. Besides, the project has delivered the first AI-driven mechanisms for automated decision-making for the proper mitigation as well as the enablers to achieve a fully functional close control loop for automated security mitigation against cyber-attacks. Furthermore, the project has designed the methodology for testing and integration, accomplished the first set of in-lab experiments, and delivered described the results of the first implemented prototype and inlab testing.
As of M18, we successfully concluded the first phase of our Integration efforts. This milestone marks significant progress, with the following key components delivered as part of this cycle:
- HSPF – Injection Mechanism, a Mechanism to inject sidecar containers into Kubernetes PODs
- HSPF – Network Traffic Collector, which enables the collection of network traffic from a specific network interface.
- HSPF – Reporting Interface, used to report network traffic anomalies and related KPI metrics.
- TRA – Threat Risk Assessor, which provides risk-scoring impact values for detected threats.
To highlight our integration capabilities among the different components, we have produced two demonstrations that simulate key scenarios showcasing RIGOUROUS in action. The first one focuses on our Public Protection and Disaster Relief Use Case, and shows how an application being deployed – whether it attempts to attack the infrastructure or suffers a component failure – has its anomalous behavior detected. The anomaly is then sent to the Security Orchestrator, which swiftly applies policy accordingly, from a preset map of anomalies->policies.
Our second demonstration centers around the RIGOUROUS Platform Validation Use Case, showcasing how we integrate security seamlessly into the development lifecycle. In this scenario, a DDoS attack targets a virtual machine (VM) in the UWS cloud. The attack is detected by the NFM component at UWS, which reports it to the E2E planner at ORO, and also to the Security Orchestrator (SO). As with the previous demo, the SO selects the security policy to be applied and sends it to the SM at UWS for enforcement.
You can see RIGOUROUS in action on our YouTube channel, with videos showcasing these two demonstrations!
We are also proud to announce the significant research output from our team, with 28 peer-reviewed publications in total, including 15 presentations at international conferences and 13 articles in prestigious journals. In addition, we successfully published 4 articles in high-impact Q1 journals such as ComNet and the Journal of Network and Computer Applications. Furthermore, 4 conference papers were presented at CORE-ranked conferences, with 3 of them achieving a ranking of B or higher.
What happened recently
- Antonio Matencio Escolar, Jorge Bernal Bernabe, Jose Maria Alcaraz Calero, Qi Wang, and Antonio Skarmeta published the work Network slicing as 6G security mechanism to mitigate cyber-attacks: the RIGOUROUS approach at the IEEE 10th International Conference on Network Softwarization
- Alberto Robles-Enciso and Antonio F. Skarmeta published the work Adapting Containerized Workloads for the Continuum Computing in IEEE Access, vol. 12
- Amir Javadpour, Forough Ja’fari, and Tarik Taleb published the work Encryption as a Service: A Review of Architectures and Taxonomies in Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS 2024)
- Amir Javadpour, Forough Ja’fari, Tarik Taleb, Chafika Benzaïd, Luis Rosa, Pedro Tomás, and Luis Cordeiro published the work Deploying Testbed Docker-based application for Encryption as a Service in Kubernetes
- Amir Javadpour, Forough Ja’fari, Tarik Taleb, Chafika Benzaïd, Yang Bin and Yue Zhao published the work Encryption as a Service (EaaS): Introducing the Full-Cloud-Fog Architecture for Enhanced Performance and Security
- Contributions from RIGOUROUS in the Software Software Networks Working White Paper
- Contributions from RIGOUROUS in the SSNS JU 6G Architecture WG White paper
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