Concept

The ambition of the NATWORK project is to set the foundations and deploy the very first economically realistic, energy efficient and viable bio-inspired AI-based 6G cybersecurity and resilience framework for intelligent networking and services, taking a holistic approach and considering all elements in a cross-sector business environment to address the diverse requirements and challenges that arise. The NATWORK project aims to develop a novel AI-leveraged self-adaptive security mechanism for 6G networks based on resilient bio- mimicry principles. The goal is to improve the malleability and the self-resilience of future 6G network ecosystems to offer augmented and secure services at the lowest energy costs. The principle premise is to empower various entities of 6G ecosystems with the ability to self-regulate their conditions to provide service continuity in compliance with service SLAs.  

The Secure Federated Learning architecture of NATWORK will be based on decentralized defensive AI models embedded in dis-aggregated 6G network physical layer, smart Edge Network Interface Cards and RAN devices with P4-based programmable data plane and advanced DPU acceleration, with local feature extraction at wire-speed and AI model training. Among the key 6G security challenges that NATWORK aims to alleviate are Moving Target Defense and adaptive response to incidents, the employment of Net Zero AI and energy-efficient security for sustainable networks, the Detection of new forms of attacks bearing deep control flow monitoring as well as the elaboration of a continuum of security for payload deployment fostering secure migration of novel forms of in-network operations and secure distributed computations.