Collaborative Research: Vines: Track 1: Establishing a Systematic Security Foundation for Next Generation Cellular Networks

Future cellular networks will support billions of devices and rely on cloud-native software components that are created, moved, and scaled dynamically across distributed infrastructures. These networks must securely coordinate interactions among network functions, tenants, and network sessions across multiple administrative domains. Current security mechanisms depend on establishing and maintaining secure sessions between communicating entities. This session-based approach introduces operational complexity, signaling overhead, and security management challenges.This collaborative project aims to establish a new foundation for cellular network security based on Named Data Networking (NDN). The goal is to secure the data itself through data-centric trust relationships, semantic names, cryptographic credentials, and trust rules that specify which entities are authorized to produce, access, and exchange specific information. This data-centric trust model integrates authentication, authorization, and auditing directly into the network architecture. The project will develop formal trust models for multi-operator and multi-tenant cellular environments, build prototype implementations, and evaluate their security, efficiency, and resilience using artificial intelligence. This research explores a fundamentally different approach to securing future cellular systems used daily for commercial, personal, and critical infrastructure communications. By embedding security directly into data exchanges, the project aims to reduce operational complexity, improve resilience against failures and attacks, and simplify the management of dynamic cloud-native network infrastructures. The resulting open-source software, prototype systems, and experimental tools will support research and education in networking and cybersecurity, train students at the intersection of networking, security, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, and help inform future generations of cellular security architectures. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.