ORACLE: Organically Resilient and Secure Wireless Networks for Next-Generation IoT Technologies to serve Future Connected Societies

It can be said that the Next-Generation Internet of Things (NG-IoT), powered by the flexibility, wide range of data-rates, support of heterogeneity, ultralow latency, intelligence and massive user capacities delivered by 5G and 6G networks, will be the main driver for economic growth and human development for the next decades. Among others, an important impact of 5G/6G and the NG-IoT is that these technologies will allow the user to use sensors and mobile devices more effectively and efficiently, according to their needs and the characteristics of the operating environment. To elaborate, while today most connected services are accessed from an APP or website running a smartphone, with the NG-IoT connected services will be provided by a multitude of devices embedded in the environment itself. Under such a scenario, however, security and in particular, light-weight, embedded, intelligent and ubiquitous security becomes an absolute necessity, or better enabler, without which the NG-IoT is unfeasible as sensitive information from users such as personal, health-related and financial data would be exposed.

In an environment such as the one described, secure access to information requires user's continuous authentication and the proliferation of services means that password-based authentication degrades the user's experience and causes bad practices in the generation and custody of such paswords. Add to the later the notion that with the NG-IoT users will interact daily with countless devices, many of which will behave autonomously, and the potential disaster in terms of vulnerabilities of private and sensitive information is clear.

Fortunately, the source of the problem is also its solution, as Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), and in particular information security and wireless communications technologies have within them all the features from which to derive the necessary measures to counteract security vulnerabilities. For example, one of the most fundamental emerging problems in data security is the raise of quantum computing and machine learning, which may soon result in such an increase in computational and inference capabilities that even the most complex encryption techniques might be exposed, because encryption keys are essentially pseudo-random numbers, where the word pseudo indicates that no computer can generate truly random numbers, but only numbers whose generation is hard to reengineer today, and which sophisticated machine learning algorithms running on powerful quantum computers might soon easily break.

Fortunately, the wireless channel has the physical property of being reciprocal and particular to a pair of transmitter-receiver, such that truly random secret keys can be generated taking advantage of the characteristics of such a channel. Indeed, according to the theoretical principles of information, secret messages can be exchanged between a source and a receiver taking advantage of the physical characteristics of the medium to build confidential channels. Project ORACLE will focus on these and other emerging techniques, aiming to resolve the security vulnerabilities of NG-IoT.