The proliferation of real-time applications like autonomous vehicles and remote surgery has intensified the need for near-zero network latency with bounded jitter and deterministic behavior. However, latency optimizations through reduced protocol overhead and minimized buffering can expose attack surfaces, creating a security-latency trade-off where security measures violate timing constraints. This study examines approaches that co-design security with ultra-low-latency networking, focusing on edge-centric security, Zero Trust models, and secure transport protocols. Using exploratory analysis, the work evaluates architectures across latency impact, threat resilience, and scalability. The synthesis reveals patterns enabling secure near-zero latency: edge-based processing with localized trust anchors, hardware-accelerated encryption, and pre-established secure sessions. Low-overhead techniques include deterministic authentication and selective enforcement based on traffic criticality. Findings show centralized security is incompatible with near-zero latency, while distributed enforcement can maintain microsecond-scale security overhead. An integrated model combining deterministic transport and localized trust demonstrates that secure, ultra-low-latency networking is achievable through co-designed architectures.
Olasehan et al. (Sun,) studied this question.