Black-Box Evasion Attacks on Data-Driven Open RAN Apps: Tailored Design and Experimental Evaluation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18160v1
• Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2025 23:21:00 GMT
• Title: Black-Box Evasion Attacks on Data-Driven Open RAN Apps: Tailored Design and Experimental Evaluation
• Authors: Pranshav Gajjar, Molham Khoja, Abiodun Ganiyu, Marc Juarez, Mahesh K. Marina, Andrew Lehane, Vijay K. Shah,
• Abstract summary: Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) is fueling innovation in the RAN towards data-driven operation.<n>Unlike traditional RAN where the RAN data and its usage is restricted within proprietary and monolithic RAN equipment, the O-RAN architecture opens up access to RAN data via RAN intelligent controllers (RICs)<n>There is an increasing recognition that RAN data access to apps could become a source of vulnerability and be exploited by malicious actors.
• Score: 5.574380483594729
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: The impending adoption of Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) is fueling innovation in the RAN towards data-driven operation. Unlike traditional RAN where the RAN data and its usage is restricted within proprietary and monolithic RAN equipment, the O-RAN architecture opens up access to RAN data via RAN intelligent controllers (RICs), to third-party machine learning (ML) powered applications - rApps and xApps - to optimize RAN operations. Consequently, a major focus has been placed on leveraging RAN data to unlock greater efficiency gains. However, there is an increasing recognition that RAN data access to apps could become a source of vulnerability and be exploited by malicious actors. Motivated by this, we carry out a comprehensive investigation of data vulnerabilities on both xApps and rApps, respectively hosted in Near- and Non-real-time (RT) RIC components of O-RAN. We qualitatively analyse the O-RAN security mechanisms and limitations for xApps and rApps, and consider a threat model informed by this analysis. We design a viable and effective black-box evasion attack strategy targeting O-RAN RIC Apps while accounting for the stringent timing constraints and attack effectiveness. The strategy employs four key techniques: the model cloning algorithm, input-specific perturbations, universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs), and targeted UAPs. This strategy targets ML models used by both xApps and rApps within the O-RAN system, aiming to degrade network performance. We validate the effectiveness of the designed evasion attack strategy and quantify the scale of performance degradation using a real-world O-RAN testbed and emulation environments. Evaluation is conducted using the Interference Classification xApp and the Power Saving rApp as representatives for near-RT and non-RT RICs. We also show that the attack strategy is effective against prominent defense techniques for adversarial ML.

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