Open or not open: Are conventional radio access networks more secure and trustworthy than Open-RAN?

The Open-RAN architecture is a highly promising and future-oriented architecture. It is intended to open up the radio access network and enable more innovation and competition in the market. This will lead to RANs for current 5G networks, but especially for future 6G networks, to move away from the current centralised, provider-specific 3G RAN architecture and therefore even better meet the requirements for future RANs. However, the change in design has also created a drastic shift in the attack surface compared to conventional RANs. In the past, this has often led to negative headlines, which in summary have often associated O-RAN with faulty or inadequate security. In this paper, we analyze what components are involved in an Open-RAN deployment, how the current state of security is to be assessed and what measures need to be taken to ensure secure operation.