Vertical industries start taking advantage of computing continuum by hosting their applications or using additional services offered by several Cloud Service Providers. Computing continuum has many advantages for Verticals as it allows to fulfil their quality of service requirements and save costs. This could be achieved due to the distributed, heterogenous and dynamic nature of infrastructure of computing continuum and Vertical’s application mobility thus its ability to migrate between different environments. However, this can progress only if in parallel to Vertical’s application mobility, the security requirements are dynamically managed and met at the required level in each environment. It is particularly important due to new regulations (e.g. Cyber Resilience Act and Network and Information Security Directive - NIS2) which define new critical industries and introduce for them additional security obligations. Noncompliance with these regulations could lead to penalties. Therefore, Verticals will have to fulfil specific security requirements and be able to deliver proof of compliance. In this paper, we propose to address those needs using emerging concept of Security Service Level Agreement. Following that, we propose a novel Security Service Level Agreement Mediator for cloud applications in mobility which negotiates Security Service Level Agreement with Verticals, continuously fulfils it in computing continuum and delivers proofs of compliance. Based on that, we define main challenges for setting up the Security Service Level Agreement Mediator on the basis of considerations presented in this paper.

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is one of the key enablers in 6G. By offering computing capabilities near the end users, it enables lower environmental impact, higher end-to-end latency, higher resiliency, among others. It is also a critical part in the Cloud-Edge-IoT continuum. However, the deployment of services in the edge poses some security challenges. This work aims at solving orchestration issues, such as how to deal with service deployment while meeting service-specific requirements, while at the same time meeting isolation requirements, in a multi-cluster environment. Our algorithm is estimated to be around 20% better than the baseline, while at the same time offering guarantees on the communication latency and isolation requirements, which the baseline cannot offer. We were able to build an orchestration engine, with an advanced algorithm to compute optimal placement of microservices, integrated in a state-of-art emulation platform, with industry best practice. This demonstrates the feasibility in practice and efficiency of our approach.

Competing service providers in the cloud environment ensure services are delivered under the promised security requirements. It is crucial for mobile services where user’s movement results in the service’s migration between edge servers or clouds in the Continuum. Maintaining service sovereignty before, during, and after the migration is a real challenge, especially when the service provider has committed to ensuring its quality following the Service Level Agreement. In this paper, we present the main challenges mobile service providers face in a cloud environment to guarantee the required level of security and digital sovereignty as described in the Security Service Level Agreement, with emphasis on challenges resulting from the service migration between the old and new locations. We present the security and sovereignty context intended for migration and the steps of the migration algorithm. We also analyze three specific service migration cases for three vertical industries with different service quality requirements.

Industry 4.0, expected to limit the burden of manual labor through the integration of cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), and machine learning methods, failed to meet social expectations. It started excluding humans from the production process. The next stage of the industrial revolution, Industry 5.0, reverses this trend by emphasizing the importance of human involvement and interaction in production processes. In this paper, we present the evolution of robotic systems, from those of Industry 4.0 to their humanized versions expected in Industry 5.0, with a particular emphasis on system cybersecurity. Moreover, we present the challenges and business opportunities that telecommunications operators face in implementing and operating robotic cyber-physical systems. We also analyze new security challenges arising from this transformation and the central role of humans in industrial processes. We illustrate the identified problems with a special case: Cobots.