Secure Open Source 5G Gains Momentum as Community Focuses on Re-aggregation, with 5G Super-Blueprints and New Members

• LFN Community publishes white paper highlighting cybersecurity efforts
• Telecom, Cloud and Enterprise align with 5G Super Blue Print across ONAP, Anuket, EMCO, Magma, ORAN-SC and more projects as Enterprise eBFP project, L3AF, is inducted into LF Networking
• ATOS, GenXComm, Keysight Technologies and Telaverge Communications join LFN as Silver members

LF Networking, which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across open source networking projects, announced continued momentum focused on re-aggregation, with updates to security, 5G blueprints, and the addition of four new Silver members: ATOS, GenXComm, Keysight Technologies, and Telaverge Communications.

"As the LF Networking community rolls into its fourth year as an umbrella project organization, we are pleased to see robust efforts focused on securing 5G across multiple project & foundations as we welcome even more industry-leading organizations to the project," said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. "It's the robust and diverse set of member companies that enable LFN's collaborative innovation into the future of 5G and networking."

5G Super Blue Print Ecosystem Expands

The community is making progress with the 5G Super Blueprint,  a community-driven integration/illustration of multiple open source initiatives, projects, and vendors coming together to show use cases demonstrating implementation architectures for end users. The 5G Super Blueprint is now integrated across even more projects––including Magma (1.6), EMCO, and Anuket––building open source components applicable to a variety of industry use cases. Preliminary scoping for future integrations with the O-RAN Software Community have begun, setting the stage for end-to-end open source interoperability from the core through the RAN and future compliance activities.

Meanwhile, the L3AF project has been inducted into the LF Networking umbrella, as membership expands further across the ecosystem with new Silver members.

L3AF is an open source project, developed by Walmart, housing cutting-edge solutions in the realm of eBPF (a revolutionary technology that allows us to run sandboxed programs in an operating system kernel) that provides complete life-cycle management of eBPF programs with the help of an advanced control plane that has been written in Golang. The  control plane orchestrates and composes independent eBPF programs across the network infrastructure to solve crucial business problems. L3AF's eBPF programs include load-balancing, rate limiting, traffic mirroring, flow exporter, packet manipulation, performance tuning, and many more.  L3AF joined the Linux Foundation in fall of 2021 and has now been inducted into the LF Networking project umbrella.

New LFN Silver members include:

• ATOS, a multi-vendor end-to-end system integrator in both IT and telecom network space; specialized in multi-cloud solutions, edge and MEC, 5G-enabled applications with an AI/ML focus, cybersecurity, and decarbonization.
• GenXComm Inc.'s mission is to deliver limitless computing power, fast connectivity, and on-demand intelligence to every location on Earth
• Keysight Technologies, Inc. is a leading technology company that delivers advanced design and validation solutions to help accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world
• Telaverge Communications is the leader in complete Network Test Automation Orchestration and Digital Transformation products (Regal for Containers and Cloud) designed for enterprises, operators and OEM's. Telaverge's open source based private LTE and 5G cores are pre-integrated with Regal for zero touch testing and deployment.

LFN Security White Paper

Highlighting its security efforts to help secure open source networking against cybersecurity attacks, the community published a white paper titled "Securing Open Source 5G from End to End" 

"A unique advantage of developing software in the open is more eyes on the code;  when it comes to security, that translates to large groups of experts who can propose improvements and enhancements in a faster, more scalable fashion-- and that is true for LFN," said Amy Zwarico, vice chair of the ONAP Security subcommittee. "Community collaboration via security working groups and sub-committees to address secure software development practices, SBOMs, DDoS mitigation and other threats are just some of the steps LFN is taking to create code that can be trusted to run our networks."

At a time when the United States White House has issued multiple Executive Orders to address cybersecurity and supply chain attacks, the LFN community continues to take steps to ensure open source networking is secure. The group is publishing a white paper to outline its security strategies, including the formation of security-focused committees and subcommittees; development and adoption of security Software Bill of Materials (SBOM); OpenSSF badging; and use of the LFX Platform's Security Dashboard to enable developers to identify and resolve vulnerabilities quickly and easily; and more. 

"The mission of Atos is to support our customers throughout a multitude of industry sectors on their edge-to-cloud journey. We help telecom customers leverage cloud synergies between their IT and their network, and introduce new edge computing and 5G MEC services. We are excited about ONAP and other programs of the LFN, as they facilitate exactly these synergies in a growing market."

"Keysight is pleased to join LF Networking as a silver member and contribute to an ecosystem with the common goal of advancing technology and innovation built on open source software and standards," said Kalyan Sundhar, vice president of Edge-to-Core Networks at Keysight Technologies. "Keysight leverages open source standards for end-to-end network harmonization produced by the LF Networking community to enable this ecosystem to cost-effectively accelerate protocol and performance design validation."

Source: LF Networking media announcement