Enhancing O-RAN Security: Evasion Attacks and Robust Defenses for Graph Reinforcement Learning-based Connection Management

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Balakrishnan, Ravikumar, Arvinte, Marius, Himayat, Nageen, Nikopour, Hosein, Moustafa, Hassnaa
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Balakrishnan, Ravikumar
Arvinte, Marius
Himayat, Nageen
Nikopour, Hosein
Moustafa, Hassnaa
author_facet Balakrishnan, Ravikumar
Arvinte, Marius
Himayat, Nageen
Nikopour, Hosein
Moustafa, Hassnaa
contents Adversarial machine learning, focused on studying various attacks and defenses on machine learning (ML) models, is rapidly gaining importance as ML is increasingly being adopted for optimizing wireless systems such as Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN). A comprehensive modeling of the security threats and the demonstration of adversarial attacks and defenses on practical AI based O-RAN systems is still in its nascent stages. We begin by conducting threat modeling to pinpoint attack surfaces in O-RAN using an ML-based Connection management application (xApp) as an example. The xApp uses a Graph Neural Network trained using Deep Reinforcement Learning and achieves on average 54% improvement in the coverage rate measured as the 5th percentile user data rates. We then formulate and demonstrate evasion attacks that degrade the coverage rates by as much as 50% through injecting bounded noise at different threat surfaces including the open wireless medium itself. Crucially, we also compare and contrast the effectiveness of such attacks on the ML-based xApp and a non-ML based heuristic. We finally develop and demonstrate robust training-based defenses against the challenging physical/jamming-based attacks and show a 15% improvement in the coverage rates when compared to employing no defense over a range of noise budgets
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_03891
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing O-RAN Security: Evasion Attacks and Robust Defenses for Graph Reinforcement Learning-based Connection Management
Balakrishnan, Ravikumar
Arvinte, Marius
Himayat, Nageen
Nikopour, Hosein
Moustafa, Hassnaa
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Adversarial machine learning, focused on studying various attacks and defenses on machine learning (ML) models, is rapidly gaining importance as ML is increasingly being adopted for optimizing wireless systems such as Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN). A comprehensive modeling of the security threats and the demonstration of adversarial attacks and defenses on practical AI based O-RAN systems is still in its nascent stages. We begin by conducting threat modeling to pinpoint attack surfaces in O-RAN using an ML-based Connection management application (xApp) as an example. The xApp uses a Graph Neural Network trained using Deep Reinforcement Learning and achieves on average 54% improvement in the coverage rate measured as the 5th percentile user data rates. We then formulate and demonstrate evasion attacks that degrade the coverage rates by as much as 50% through injecting bounded noise at different threat surfaces including the open wireless medium itself. Crucially, we also compare and contrast the effectiveness of such attacks on the ML-based xApp and a non-ML based heuristic. We finally develop and demonstrate robust training-based defenses against the challenging physical/jamming-based attacks and show a 15% improvement in the coverage rates when compared to employing no defense over a range of noise budgets
title Enhancing O-RAN Security: Evasion Attacks and Robust Defenses for Graph Reinforcement Learning-based Connection Management
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.03891