Foreword

Walking down the street or in any office, building, or restaurant, wireless connections to mobile networks through cellular phones, "cash" registers, laptop computers, headphones, and more exist in such abundance that the sheer number of connections feels impossible to grasp. Beyond these visual reminders of our wireless mobile connections, the vast hidden network of devices, systems, and infrastructure ensures quick, clear, and effortless access to all that the network and mobile communications have to offer. Who doesn't have a cell phone in hand and earbuds in their ears as they navigate their day? Much like Haraway's modern cyborg, 5th-generation wireless and the promises of the 6th generation make connectivity not just ubiquitous but also an extension of ourselves [1]. With the high demand for easy, inexpensive, safe, and quick access anywhere in the world, invisible wireless infrastructure security becomes paramount, especially with so much personal data being produced that is easily identifiable and close to each user. Securing 6G will prove critical to safeguard not only this vital infrastructure and our devices but also each individual user and this new way of connected living.

6G Security: New Frontiers in Mobile Network Technologies and Verticals highlights, showcases, and explains forward-thinking research, releases, and technologies for securing 6th-generation wireless. Bowker and Star note in their Science, Technology, and Society (STS) infrastructure research the importance of making the complex, invisible infrastructure and classification systems (like the 3rd Generation Partnership Project) visible to more than the technical experts as the easier these networks are to use and the larger they become, the more difficult the infrastructure becomes to see [2]. This book makes network infrastructure visible through readable, actionable, format-specific ways to secure the hardware, software, devices, and data in 6G wireless network technologies. Its user-friendly language and definitions, detailed examples, algorithms, experiments, and citations enable the reader of 6G Security: New Frontiers in Mobile Network Technologies and Verticals to use the book as a researcher, professor, or student easily. Whether preventing spoofing or jamming, developing secure open radio access networks (Open RAN), or using AI for cybersecurity or cybersecurity for AI, these 10 chapters each introduce, define, and explain key takeaways for 6th-generation wireless.

One can easily read this book from cover to cover as a course textbook or to develop an understanding of ways to secure 6G, but the book is also divided into chapters and two identifiable parts. Chapter 1 provides a historical overview of wireless technologies and securing them through the generations, and then looks ahead to 6G security issues. The book's first half explains new technologies leading wireless cybersecurity researchers expect to be incorporated into 6G and by the 3GPP's (3rd Generation Partnership Project) standard setting or releases that align with what the wireless technologies community calls 6G.

The second half of the book explores how 6G features will impact a new generation of applications and verticals. This organization of the book allows the reader to use each chapter or section as a standalone or a collection of articles. Unlike most computer science/engineering books, 6G Security: New Frontiers in Mobile Network Technologies and Verticals may be used by a wider audience, from a cybersecurity policymaker looking to understand and develop policy and funding around securing 6G to a social science researcher or student exploring sociotechnical imaginaries or network ideologies [3, 4].

Understanding and using the technical artifacts and the research contained within this book leads to a critical examination of power dynamics, geopolitics, possible inequities, social dynamics, and the social construction of wireless technologies. Together with computer scientists and engineers researching and developing the artifacts themselves, social and political scientists can collaborate to ensure safe access and use of 6G for all. Dirk van Laak details in Lifelines of Society: A Global History of Infrastructure that the need for securing 6G infrastructure includes a promising future for the wireless technologies and users to develop more opportunities, better living conditions, participate actively in more social and political decision-making, and increase one's prosperity [5]. On the flip side, 6G can be very expensive, especially if insecure. 5G's ubiquity has already caused user dependence on wireless infrastructure. This dependency of wireless technologies will further shape user and geopolitical control and conduct [5]. The borderless existence of 6G wireless networks demands security prioritization since 6G will further globalization and interconnectedness.

Though many authors in 6G Security: New Frontiers in Mobile Network Technologies and Verticals describe their research and chapters as a paradigm shift in securing wireless technologies, I caution using this term and ask the readers to look at its use through an informed and critical lens. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, defined a paradigm as a widely accepted scientific model that gains its status and acceptance in the scientific field because the paradigm is successful in solving critical problems the scientific community deems problematic and acute [6]. Kuhn further contends that the majority of normal science (traditional basic scientific research) consists of researching to articulate and show the theories and phenomena the paradigm already provides [6]. Therefore, a scientific revolution, known as a paradigm shift, is when the former paradigm no longer resolves critically acute problems.

Thus, a new one must be developed to resolve the crisis. Normal science is problem-solving within the current paradigm, while the paradigm shift is when the scientific community finds the crisis intolerable, rejects the previous paradigm, then substitutes it and accepts the new paradigm [6]. I caution the acceptance of a 6G security paradigm shift for a few specific reasons, including:

1. Kuhn argues that textbooks are produced after a scientific revolution to spread and develop this new paradigm tradition. Textbooks become produced and used as a resolution of revolutions [6].
2. These chapters exemplify the puzzle-solving of normal research within a paradigm, as they do not reject the previous paradigm and present a new one.
3. The issue of securing 6G in these chapters, though problematic and a worrisome concern that needs to be the priority of 6G, is not so problematic that it is currently unresolved and not a true crisis.

With these reasons in mind, this book could represent the beginning of a paradigm shift, and the reader should wonder and examine whether the chapters blur the paradigm, which then loosens the paradigm rules for normal research [6]. Since the book is at the forefront of 6G, outlining these possible new frontiers could test the paradigm boundaries, as described in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's quotation used in the National Science Foundation's 75th Anniversary Edition (2020) of Vannevar Bush's The Endless Frontier, that new frontiers of the mind lie ahead and could help us build a better, more fulfilling life (Bush).

Additionally, regardless of interest or use of the book, readers should read the second half of it with the social construction of technology (SCOT) in mind. These wireless artifacts have politics, meaning that technical things, including wireless networks and technologies, embody authority and power due to their construction [7]. Many actors help in the development of science and technology through their active participation or silence. Decisions about what will be funded, researched, and developed by these actors shape the basic and applied sciences. Though it may be common and accepted practice to look at normal and applied science through a positivist lens, meaning that all science and technology are discovered through an objective view, empirical data, and experimentation, SCOT argues that scientific knowledge is not produced so linearly. Instead, it is multidirectional, with not just the normal science of research and experimentation but also the relevant social group's usage and the technology itself influencing the development [8]. Through these interactions, there is interpretive flexibility. Flexibility occurs in how one interprets or thinks about how the technology works and develops how it is designed [8]. Once the interpretation and use of the technology stabilize or succeed as an accepted paradigm, there is closure as the controversy/problems with the construction of the technology have ended. Like Kuhn's paradigms, this closure can be reopened when a relevant social group has an unresolved problem or crisis. Questions to ask throughout the book include:

1. Who are the relevant social groups, and how may they construct 6G?
2. What are their interpretations of the technologies and verticals? How have or could these contributed to the success or failure of previous constructions?
3. What stakes do relevant social groups have in this next generation of wireless technology, and how may this influence the stabilization and closure of 6G security?

I challenge readers to go beyond their role as engineers, students, industry partners, or professors and consider the layers embedded within each chapter's...