NTIA Funds Open Radio Commercialization and Innovation Project to Research Standards and Develop Architecture for Identity Assurance and Interoperability
SecureG, announced it has aligned with 1Finity (a Fujitsu company), Intel, and Rhythmic Technologies to research and develop an end-to-end supply chain traceability registry for open radio access networks (O-RAN). SecureG will lead a coalition of US-based chipset, open radio unit (O-RU) manufacturers, and mobile network operators (MNOs) to enhance the security and interoperability of O-RAN. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) awarded SecureG and its partners more than $6M to enhance critical infrastructure protection for the telecommunications industry.
“Nation state threats against critical infrastructure have become omnipresent and supply chain risks are at an all-time high,” said Todd Warble, CTO, SecureG. “This O-RAN interoperability team is committed to improving critical infrastructure protection for mobile network providers to secure the future of O-RAN.”
O-RAN is an open and interoperable standard that has been adopted by dozens of mobile networks operators and hundreds of vendors. O-RAN specifications have been developed by the O-RAN Alliance, 3GPP, and IEEE, among others. However, it can be challenging for mobile MNOs and ORU manufacturers to make sense of the hundreds of technical documents published by multiple standards developing organizations (SDOs).
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“Through NTIA funding, 1Finity and SecureG can evaluate, integrate and demonstrate the efficacy of SecureG’s Supply Chain Traceability Registry through our O-RAN incubation testbed,” said Greg Manganello, Senior Vice President of the Network Software & Integration Business Unit at 1Finity. “By ensuring supply chain security, we will enable further adoption and advancement of Open RAN architectures, bringing faster integration, innovation and agility to the broader ecosystem.”
SecureG will be conducting a multi-phase research and development project to test a new identity assurance architecture and supply chain traceability (SCT) registry platform, which could securely enable O-RU manufacturers to easily and rapidly develop O-RAN radios that are easily integrated into any MNO’s network.
“Transparency and traceability are essential to establishing trust in the supply chain.” said John Healey, Vice President of Inte Corporation, “Incorporating FIDO Device Onboard (FDO) into O-RAN deployments, powered by Intel platforms, further standardizes the secure transfer of devices between suppliers and operators, providing a mutually authenticated foundational framework for the late-binding of runtime secrets and configurations.”
The group of companies will research how to most effectively implement a SCT registry with an architecture built to address security and interoperability for O-RUs in a vendor-neutral manner. Development will begin with a high-fidelity proof of concept that demonstrates existing security and interoperability issues to identify areas to improve performance.
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“Enabling the interoperability of open radio units should be married to security, but security cannot hinder the innovation of open radio access networks,” said Dobroslav Slavenskoj, Director of Professional Services at Rhythmic Technologies. “Our mission is to enable the efficiency and effectiveness of these mission-critical workloads, while maintaining their security.”
SecureG and the coalition of companies will target deploying the results of this project across the 5G O-RAN ecosystem and related industrial IoT environments, as well as proposing extensions or enhancements to relevant 3GPP and O-RAN SDOs.