Back in December 2018 I wrote a blog: “5G is passé. 6G is coming!” observing that, although there had been little mainstream mention of the next generation of cellular technology, 6G, work was already underway in a number of labs.”
I detailed a number of those initiatives, and observed: “not surprisingly none of the big 5G vendors are saying a peep about 6G yet. They want all the attention to be focussed on 5G to make it a big success.”
Well things move rapidly in the world of cellular technology and Huawei is now busy whetting the world’s appetite for the features and benefits 6G will bring — and warning us of some of the problems — all before most of us have experienced any of the features and benefits 5G will bring.
6G and Huawei’s 6G credentials have become mainstream news: on the ABC website, in a story citing a (claimed) exclusive report from Canadian news site The Logic saying Huawei had begun researching 6G at its Ottawa lab.
It is very unlikely that Ottawa is the sole location for Huawei’s 6G research: different aspects of the technology are almost certainly being studied in multiple locations.
Back in February Light Reading reported Huawei CEO Eric Xu saying 6G was on his mind. “I anticipate that by 2028 or 2029 or 2030, we are going see 6G as extensively discussed as we are seeing 5G today.”
The way things are going, those discussions are going to ramp up much faster, and Huawei seems intent on making sure they do.
Huawei Australia chief technology and cyber security officer David Soldani told the Emerging Innovation Summit in Melbourne that Australia risks facing serious issues with the deployment of 5G and future 6G technology unless new policies were introduced to address cyber-security concerns.
He said 6G networks would offer “extraordinary potential for new applications and services – far greater than what will be available on 5G” but bringing additional risks.
Huawei warns on 6G security
He claimed Huawei to be “way ahead of our rivals on 6G research,” saying: “We can see that the way in which we will be gathering and consuming data on those 6G networks means the cyber security risks will increase.
“The way that future 6G networks are designed means that the attack surface is larger for potential attacks as the traditional network boundaries and security control zone become ever wider.”
The aim of Soldani’s comments appear to have been to sow the seeds of FUD among the Australian Government’s cyber security people over the wisdom of banning Huawei cellular gear from Australian networks.
“The way that future 6G networks are designed means that the attack surface is larger for potential attacks as the traditional network boundaries and security control zone become ever wider,” Soldani said.
“In addition, with the converge of management and control plane, AI will pose a significant impact on network security, as it might be exploited to launch more effective attacks … Unlike security vulnerabilities in traditional systems, the root cause of security weaknesses in machine learning systems lies in the lack of explicability, which leaves openings that can be exploited by adversarial machine learning methods such as evasion, poisoning, and backdoor attacks.
“Attackers may also implant backdoors in models and launch targeted attacks or extract model parameters or training data from query results.”
Soldani concluded: “Unless Australia changes it approach and adopts a standards and certification led approach to security then it will simply sleepwalk into a world of cyber-security problems in both 5G and 6G for which it is totally unprepared.”
Huawei talks up 6G
In the race of 6G bragging rights Huawei seems to be well ahead of the competition. The only meaningful reference to 6G we could find on the Ericsson web site was toan April 2019 podcast in which Ericsson’s Head of Research, Magnus Frodigh, and head of technology strategy, Håkan Andersson “talk about how 5G came to be, what it is now, and what it will be in the future – and will there be a 6G?”
That at least is an improvement since I last looked, in December: a video on Facebook 6G: The Internet of Goats. Nothing to do with 6G really, or goats for that matter.
We could find no mention of 6G on Nokia’s website either. However, in June Korean telco SK Telecom announced it had signed MoUs with Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung for joint R&D “in advanced 5G and 6G mobile network technologies.”
Where Huawei leads, others are likely to soon follow. So expect to hear more about 6G in coming months.
