6G technologies, benefitting from softwarisation, Gb/s speed and sub-THz communications paradigms, open up opportunities for developing new and innovative network management strategies while navigating the evolution toward disaggregation, new software-based paradigms in architecting and operating future connectivity platforms, and embracing features of computing, automation and smartness, trust, privacy and security.

Supported by this technology evolution, as the vision of new, smart and innovative capabilities is becoming a reality, superb user experience is expected even in presence of mobility and resource volatility.

However, the fundamentally new and unknown features of advanced, disaggregated, virtualized and multi-vendor 6G based infrastructures, challenge the security and resilience design to the next level, by managing the unknown, complex and highly versatile infrastructures as they evolve.

Indeed, the future deployment of 6G networks is inextricably connected with an integration of diverse hardware elements and infrastructures, thus leading not only to a highly heterogeneous environment, but also to functions and features that cannot be anticipated at the time of design.

The vision of HORSE in this complex scenario, is to deal with the technology solutions, and system evaluation not yet foreseen, towards an omnipresent, smart and secure network service provisioning in the future network-of-networks landscape.

To this end, HORSE proposes a novel human-centric, open-source, green, sustainable, coordinated provisioning and protection evolutionary platform, which can inclusively yet seamlessly combine advancements in several domains, as they get added to the system (e.g. predictive threats detection, proactive business-wise threats and breaches mitigation actions, programmable networking, semantic communications, Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), intent-based networking, AI-based techniques, cross-layer management of physical layer features, etc.).