6G Standards Work Accelerating, but Many Questions Remain, CSRIC Is Told
The FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council held its first meeting under new FCC Chairman Brendan Carr on Wednesday, hearing updates on 6G and from its two other working groups. CSRIC last met in December (see 2412180041).
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Brian Daly, co-chair of the Preparing for 6G Security and Reliability working group, said the 3rd Generation Partnership Project has started the “actual technical studies” of the 6G radio interface and the core network architecture, which will intensify in June. Security, resilience and reliability are “front and center” for 6G, Daly said, adding that latency, user experience, data rates and peak data rates are also key areas of study.
Everything really got started with the ITU’s “vision” for International Mobile Telecommunications-2030, said Daly, AT&T's assistant vice president-wireless technology and standards. “Those vision statements have defined the framework,” he said: “The requirements and evaluation are under development and will be available early next year.” That will be followed by standardization by 3GPP “and potentially elsewhere, followed by the specifications being evaluated within the ITU.”
3GPP Release 20 will have the study items for 6G, with work starting now and continuing through 2026, Daly explained. Specifications are expected in late 2027 or early 2028, he said. 3GPP Release 21, expected to be finalized in June 2027, will offer the first "formal" 6G specifications, which will be "evaluated against the IMT-2030 requirements,” he said.
3GPP held a workshop on 6G this month in South Korea, Daly said. It was well-attended -- with nearly 750 people coming in-person and 219 contributions from carriers, vendors, academics and others -- “and their discussion covered the entire system,” he said. “Building security into the system from day one is one of the important principles that came out of the workshop,” he said, citing the need to understand the threats that could exist.
“Ultimately, what you want to do is to produce a threat model, get an understanding of what the threats are to that system, to those applications and to that environment that you’re analyzing,” Daly said. The time to mitigate risk is before an attack has occurred and the network has been damaged, he said. “You don’t necessarily want to be reactive.”
Daly noted the challenge of developing 6G security standards while other standards are still being established. “We’re just in the early stages of developing 6G standards in general,” he said. “We don’t have a full grasp of what the architecture is going to look like, although we have some hints on the direction 3GPP might be going.” That doesn’t mean “there’s nothing we can do” to get started on security standards.
A first report by the Harnessing AI/Machine Learning to Ensure the Security, Reliability and Integrity of the Nation’s Communications Networks working group was due Wednesday but will be completed in June, said Vijay Gurbani, its co-chair and Vail Systems' chief data scientist. To finalize a report, the group had to simplify its work, he said.
“We haven’t abandoned anything. We’ve realigned and tried to focus on areas that relate directly to telecommunications networks,” Gurbani said. One area that will have to wait for a future CSRIC is the IoT, he said.
“The work that you all are doing is incredibly important, as the nation has immense challenges that are in front of us,” said CSRIC co-Chair Billy Bob Brown, assistant director at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.