Building a Security Canopy Over O-RAN: The SDP Paradigm

The Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) architecture provides flexibility in the deployment of RAN, but introduces significant security vulnerabilities due to its open interfaces and disaggregated nature, expanding the attack surface for threats like DoS, DDoS, MiTM, unauthorized access, etc. Current security solutions often lack comprehensive protection.

This paper proposes an O-RAN-SDP framework integrating Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) principles to establish security protection in the O-RAN with Zero-Trust deployment. By deploying an SDP Controller (SDPC) as an xApp within the NearRT RIC and embedding SDP agents in O-RAN components, our approach utilizes the Single Packet Authorization (SPA) and secure tunneling in the O-RAN-SDP architecture. This provides robust authentication, authorization, and attack surface reduction, inherently mitigating DoS/DDoS, MiTM, and zero-day vulnerability attacks across the O-RAN ecosystem.