The Owner, the Provider and the Subcontractors: How to Handle Accountability and Liability Management for 5G End to End Service

Abstract

The adoption of 5G services depends on the capacity to provide high-value services. In addition to enhanced performance, the capacity to deliver Security Service Level Agreements (SSLAs) and demonstrate their fulfillment would be a great incentive for the adoption of 5G services for critical 5G Verticals (e.g., service suppliers like Energy or Intelligent Transportation Systems) subject to specific industrial safety, security or service level rules and regulations (e.g., NIS or SEVESO Directives). Yet, responsibilities may be difficult to track and demonstrate because 5G infrastructures are interconnected and complex, which is a challenge anticipated to be exacerbated in future 6G networks. This paper describes a demonstrator and a use case that shows how 5G Service Providers can deliver SSLAs to their customers (Service Owners) by leveraging a set of network enablers developed in the INSPIRE-5Gplus project to manage their accountability, liability and trust placed in subcomponents of a service (subcontractors). The elaborated enablers are in particular a novel sTakeholder Responsibility, AccountabIity and Liability deScriptor (TRAILS), a Liability-Aware Service Management Referencing Service (LASM-RS), an anomaly detection tool (IoT-MMT), a Root Cause Analysis tool (IoT-RCA), two Remote Attestation mechanisms (Systemic and Deep Attestation), and two Security-by-Orchestration enablers (one for the 5G Core and one for the MEC).