Journal of ICT Standardization

Special Issue on Cloud Native Security for 5G, 5G-A and 6G

With 5G already being deployed globally, 5G-Advanced standards being progressed and 6G research initiatives underway, the investments provide a fascinating prospect for our future. Such technology advances will enable the shift from the Internet of Things to the Internet of Intelligence. Specifically, 6G Wireless aims at bridging the “physical” and “cyber” worlds, enabling the paradigm shift from connected people and things to connected intelligence. 6G Wireless is expected to be built on an open & unified cloud native security and networking platform – such as Kubernetes (K8s) and its evolution – which will host containerized 6G workloads secure by design.
Disaggregated architectures and emerging technologies such as containerization, container orchestration and artificial intelligence (AI) are part of the 6G fundamentals. This will in turn bring inevitable and significant changes to the threat landscape by introducing new security challenges. These security concerns, among other issues, need to be seriously assessed, and the potential risks (threats*vulnerabilities) to disruption and hostile interference must be mitigated through concrete security measures. Also, the mixture of new possible risks and reduced residual risk tolerance – especially with 5G, 5G-Advanced and 6G expected to be deployed on critical infrastructures – demands for the adoption and implementation of a defense in-depth strategy augmented by a zero-trust model to make the network resilient to any potential internal or external attack vector. All these together further strengthens the importance of a secure and resilient cloud native platform and having in place adequate countermeasures for the protection of information and communication systems, in relation to national and individual security.
This special issue aims at presenting the most relevant scenarios, use-cases, target security architectures, best practices, prominent new revolutionary safeguards, and state-of-the-art advances of security measures for cloud native platforms, augmented by trustworthy AI for detecting the undetectable and predicting unknown threats and secure the intangible.


Technical papers describing previously unpublished, original, state-of-the-art research, and not currently under review by a conference or a journal, will be considered. Specifically, the special issue welcomes two categories of papers: 1) invited articles from qualified experts, and 2) contributed papers from the open call with a list of addressed topics.


Suggested Topics
We solicit articles on a variety of topics related to cloud native security (CNS) for 5G, 5G-Advanced and for future 6G services. Topics of interest include, but not be limited to, the following:

CI/CD pipeline security (DevSecOps).
Secure secrets data, cluster data and identity store.
Secure communication between services – within a cluster and between clusters.
Secure access to K8s cluster using role-based access control and K8s network policies.
Attestation for cloud services.
Unified Zero-Trust Identity, Authentication, Authorization and Admission control (IAAA) for any “subject” requesting access to any “object”.
Continuous security posture assessments of subjects connected to objects.
Observability and security tooling, e.g., based on eBPF/XDP
Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DTL) for CNS.
Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) for CNS.
Management approaches for multi-stakeholder cloud native networks.
Hardware Accelerators for CNS.
Hardware-based roots-of-trust and trusted execution environments for CNS.
Privacy Preserving Technologies in Cloud-native.
Submission Procedure

Submitted papers should not be under consideration elsewhere for publication and manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the Information for Authors section of the Paper Submission Guidelines.
Please do not hesitate to contact the Guest Editors if you would like to know whether other related topics fit this special issue
More information can be found on the journal website: https://journals.riverpublishers.com/index.php/JICTS/



Important Dates:

Paper Submission: November 15, 2022
First Revisions/Reject Notification: Dec 30, 2022
Revision submission deadline: January 31, 2023
Final notification of Acceptance/Reject: Feb 20, 2023
Final Manuscript Due: March 31, 2023


Submission Guideline

Papers should be submitted via: https://journals.riverpublishers.com/index.php/JICTS/submissions

Author kit is available at https://www.riverpublishers.com/authors.php


Guest Editors:

David Soldani*, Rakuten Mobile, Australia
Email: dr.david.soldani(@)gmail.com

Rahim Tafazollli, University of Surrey, UK
Email: r.tafazolli(@)surrey.ac.uk

Silke Holtmanns, PwC, Finland
Email: silke.holtmanns(@)pwc.com

Devaki Chandramouli, Nokia Bell Labs, USA
Email: devaki.chandramouli(@)nokia.com

*corresponding editor