A Trusted Service Repository for Secure and Intent-Driven Service Orchestration in 6G Service-Oriented Architectures

Abstract

6G Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are characterized by extreme softwarization, AI-native orchestration, and tight edge-cloud integration, introducing significant trust and security challenges. Dynamic onboarding of Security Functions (SFs), multi-stakeholder service composition, and intent-driven orchestration expand the attack surface and require advanced mechanisms for trust-aware service management. This paper presents a Trusted Service Repository (TSR), designed as a federatable trust-aware repository supporting secure discovery, composition, and lifecycle management of security services in Sixth-Generation (6G) environments. Unlike traditional service registries, the TSR embeds trust semantics including artifact provenance, dependency graphs, vulnerability exposure, and Security Service Level Agreement (SSLA) bindings. The TSR adopts a hybrid data model combining document-oriented storage for intent-based retrieval with graph-based representations for dependency reasoning and trust propagation. The system exposes OpenAPI -compliant REST APIs supporting CRUD operations, subscriptions, and schema introspection, enabling seamless integration within programmable security planes. A prototype implementation based on ElasticSearch and Neo4j demonstrates that intent-based queries can be executed within sub-second latency for realistic catalog sizes, and that trust metrics and dependency depth significantly influence service selection. The TSR thus acts as both a discovery engine and a policy-aware trust validation component, enabling secure and scalable orchestration in 6G Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs).