ELASTIC featured in the SNS Journal 2025: Enhancing security and efficiency in 6G service orchestration

The SNS Journal 2025, published by the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU), provides a broad overview of 79 research, innovation, and trial projects that are driving Europe’s progress towards advanced 5G and 6G technologies. With around €900 million in public funding, matched by industry investment, the programme reflects Europe’s ambition to establish leadership in secure, sustainable, and competitive digital infrastructures.

The Journal showcases technical achievements, validation results, and early innovations from projects working on connectivity, architectures, vertical applications, and sustainable systems. Among these, the ELASTIC project is featured on pages 138–139 for its work on strengthening efficiency and security in 6G service orchestration.

 

ELASTIC’s focus in 6G orchestration

ELASTIC addresses a key challenge in future communication systems: orchestrating and securing services across the cloud–fog–edge continuum. The project leverages cloud-native ecosystems to optimise service execution and develop secure orchestration frameworks for 6G. Its priorities include:

  • Optimising executable isolation for secure and efficient cloud and edge computing.
  • Designing a secure, architecture-agnostic Function as a Service (FaaS) framework.
  • Building privacy-preserving execution environments based on confidential computing.
  • Implementing efficient orchestration for IoT and edge workloads.
  • Supporting 6G standardisation and European-aligned secure service frameworks.

 

Architecture and core technologies

The ELASTIC architecture is organised into five functional blocks:

  • Orchestration – managing services across cloud–fog–edge infrastructures.
  • Isolation & Confidentiality – securing data with WebAssembly (Wasm) and eBPF tools, supported by Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).
  • Communication – ensuring secure exchange of data and acceleration of microservices.
  • Monitoring & Detection – enabling observability and intrusion detection.
  • Trust & Access Control – providing secure access through attestation and access control mechanisms.

This modular design allows ELASTIC to support scalability, security, and adaptability across heterogeneous infrastructures.

 

Key innovations

The project introduces several concrete innovations that address the complexity of securing and orchestrating distributed systems:

  • Wasm HAL for TEEs – seamless access to TEE functionalities via WebAssembly.
  • Edge device security – lightweight Wasm-based orchestration for constrained environments.
  • Remote attestation & access control – supporting secure migration and lightweight attribute-based access control.
  • Serverless orchestration – low-latency orchestration using Wasm.
  • Decentralised Federated learning optimisation – improving scalability and privacy in FL models.
  • eBPF-based security – enabling early vulnerability detection.
  • Wasm integration with Kubernetes – minimising overhead for orchestration.
  • Federated Learning Toolbox – the first Wasm-based orchestration tool for secure and traceable FL on edge nodes.
  • Microservices acceleration – using eBPF and RDMA for performance gains.

Together, these tools form a comprehensive toolkit for secure, efficient, and scalable orchestration in 6G infrastructures.

 

Demonstration through use cases

ELASTIC’s progress is being validated through two main use cases:

  1. Smart Connected Factory of the Future – assessing portability, usability, and security of ELASTIC technologies in industrial environments, including eBPF vulnerability detection and portable data fabric drivers.
  2. Privacy-Preserving IT Service Migration – demonstrating secure migration of sensitive IT workloads from private data centres to the cloud, ensuring compliance with cybersecurity rules and validating remote attestation in multi-vendor environments.

These use cases provide realistic testbeds for ELASTIC technologies, ensuring their practical value and transferability across domains.

 

Progress and results

To date, ELASTIC has defined its architecture and consolidated 26 distinct tools that address orchestration and security challenges in 6G networks. The project has also analysed frameworks such as WebAssembly and eBPF to understand their potential and limitations for service orchestration. Lightweight orchestration frameworks based on confidential computing are under development, with further validation planned through the project’s use cases.

 

Access the SNS Journal 2025

The SNS Journal 2025 is available online and offers a comprehensive look at Europe’s ongoing 5G and 6G research. ELASTIC’s full contribution can be found on pages 138–139.

 

🔗 Read the SNS Journal 2025