Accountability and Liability for 5G and Beyond

INSPIRE-5Gplus workshop

Milon Gupta
Eurescom

On 16th June 2021, the INSPIRE-5Gplus project held a full-day online workshop on accountability and liability for 5G and beyond. It brought together more than 30 researchers and practitioners from several domains, including actuaries, lawyers, and researchers in networking and multi-agent systems. They presented challenges and approaches for liability management in multi-party 5G ecosystems and digital services, with a forward-looking perspective on Beyond 5G systems.

The main purpose of the workshop was to share, compare and disseminate best practices, approaches, tools and methodologies for identifying, formulating, and managing liability in 5G systems. The workshop addressed crucial topics such as formalization of commitments and obligations, contractualization, monitoring & supervision, evidence collection & analysis at runtime, as well as post-mortem evidence collection & forensics for identifying liabilities in case of disasters, security incidents, or regulation violations.

The workshop moderated by Gürkan Gür from Zurich University of Applied Sciences started in the morning with presentations by INSPIRE-5G­plus partners, covering topics from the Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) standard and Liability-Aware Security Management (LASM) to Root Cause Analysis (RCA).

This was followed by presentations covering a variety of multi-disciplinary aspects. Sylvie Jonas from AGIL’IT Law explained how liability management based on contracts works in a 5G environment. Carmen Fernandez Gago from University of Málaga talked about accountability in the cloud. And Samia Bouzefrane from the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts (Cnam), France presented a trust-based recommendation system.

In the afternoon session, Jacques Kruse-Brandao from SGS presented challenges, approaches and concepts for 5G device security certification. Arthur Van Der Wees from Arthur’s Legal talked about trustworthy and accountable digital ecosystems. And Claire Loiseaux from Internet of Trust presented responsibilities and certification in cybersecurity space.

A round-table discussion with the speakers, moderated by Gürkan Gür, concluded the workshop. The panel discussed questions like: What is the major challenge for multi-party liability management? Who has to manage liability between parties? And what would be nice to have for multi-party liability management? While the speakers provided knowledgeable answers to these questions, many aspects of liability management require still plenty of research and multi-disciplinary discussion. In view of the growing economic and societal importance of 5G applications and services, finding technical, regulatory, and legal solutions for the topics highlighted at the workshop will be of high importance for the success of 5G and 6G.

Further information
Workshop page – https://www.5g-eve.eu/event/final-5g-eve-webinar-validation-platform-achievements-and-multi-site-use-case-deployment/

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