Trust Aspects of Internet of Things in the Context of 5G and Beyond

The Sixth-generation communication system (6G) relies on some groundbreaking technological enablers to provide IoT with its full realization. However, with a myriad of user equipment and IoT devices connected everywhere with different levels of capability, 6G will need a holistic approach to reconcile the strict security requirements with any Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) among smart objects. As a key part of the 6G development, Blockchain is considered as an essential technology to simultaneously address both these stringent demands. In this paper, we consider a two-level approach, where trust is modeled by combining a high-level component based on Blockchain and Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) to manage device identities, and a low-level component based on a temporal decay and relative entropy components. Numerical results obtained from two different datasets substantiate our trust approach as a promising option aiming to shed some light on how the trust aspects should be considered in the context of 6G.