en.Wedoany.com Reported - University College Dublin (UCD) has been designated as the lead institution for the Shield-6G project, a €8 million initiative funded by the EU's Horizon Europe Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking, aimed at establishing foundational security, reliability, and resilience guidelines for sixth-generation mobile communication networks (6G).
The project was the sole winner in a competitive Horizon Europe tender, reflecting the European Commission's emphasis on ensuring the security of next-generation connectivity infrastructure. Shield-6G is an AI-driven cyber threat intelligence platform designed to elevate network reliability to what its creators describe as "unprecedented" system resilience standards. As 6G is widely expected to serve as the connective tissue between cloud infrastructure, autonomous systems, edge computing, and national critical infrastructure, embedding security architecture before commercial deployment begins is crucial.
Madhusanka Liyanage, Director of UCD NetsLab and head of the Shield-6G consortium, stated that 6G will be far more than the next step in mobile connectivity; it will form the intelligent digital nervous system of future society, connecting people, industries, critical infrastructure, and autonomous systems. The project is working to embed security, trustworthiness, and resilience into this future foundation.
The proposed architecture combines automated zero-touch security orchestration with privacy-preserving analytics, including federated learning, secure multi-party computation, and differential privacy. Its goal is to enable multi-stakeholder networks to share threat intelligence and self-heal against cascading vulnerabilities without transmitting raw sensitive data between parties. This capability is critical in an environment where cross-border data flows face increasingly stringent regulatory scrutiny, and telecom operators both compete and must cooperate on shared infrastructure threats. The consortium brings together 19 international partners, including academic research institutions, multinational industrial companies, and highly specialized small and medium-sized enterprises.
The Shield-6G project aligns with efforts in the European standards community. Ultan Mulligan, Chief Service Officer at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), previously stated that AI will not only be a feature of 6G but also its driving force. In terms of security, ensuring the quality and performance of AI systems, as well as data security, is paramount. ETSI released its first cybersecurity standard for AI systems late last year and anticipates more standards as the threat landscape and technology evolve. According to research published this month by Dell'Oro Group, cumulative 6G RAN revenue and wireless capital expenditure over the first six years of the commercial cycle are expected to exceed $100 billion and $500 billion, respectively. These figures highlight the immense scale of infrastructure and capital that will ultimately depend on the security architecture currently being defined.
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