Toward Secure and Efficient O-RAN Deployments: Secure Slicing xApp Use Case

The open radio access network (O-RAN) is rec-ognized for its modularity and adaptability, facilitating swift responses to emerging applications and technological advance-ments. However, this architecture's disaggregated nature, cou-pled with support from various vendors, introduces new security challenges. This paper proposes an innovative approach to bolster the security of future 0- RAN deployments by leveraging RAN slicing principles. Central to this security enhancement is the concept of secure slicing. We introduce SliceX, an xApp designed to safeguard RAN resources while ensuring strict throughput and latency requirements are met for legitimate users. Leveraging the open artificial intelligence cellular re-search (OAIC) platform, we observed that the network latency averages around ten microseconds in a default configuration without SliceX. The latency escalates to over seven seconds in the presence of a malicious user equipment (UE) flooding the net-work with requests. SliceX intervenes, restoring network latency to normal levels, with a maximum latency of approximately 2.3 s. These and other numerical findings presented in this paper affirm the tangible advantages of SliceX in mitigating security threats and ensuring that 0- RAN deployments meet stringent performance requirements. Our research demonstrates the real-world effectiveness of secure slicing, making SliceX a valuable tool for military, government, and critical infrastructure opera-tors reliant on public wireless communication networks to fulfill their security, resiliency, and performance objectives.