Radio Access Network Security

Securing a versatile, hybrid, and highly scalable 4G and 5G radio access network is critical due to the evolving nature of technology and new use cases these networks can now deliver. Evolving LTE and 5G RAN technologies and architectures are expanding the operators’ customer segment from consumers to enterprises and industries – enabling new markets and growth engines. But at the same time, they introduce complexity and increase the potential attack surface and risk presented by the 5G radio access infrastructure. It is clear that the delivery of business and industry use cases to drive growth must be accompanied with the appropriate security controls – in the RAN and elsewhere in the telco cloud.

Securing the RAN for industry use cases and scalable and hybrid architectures mandates a new kind of security gateway (SecGW) infrastructure. It requires one that is agile and hybrid, provides advanced security capabilities, and capable of supporting the mixed architectures and different performance, scalability, and QoS requirements 4G and 5G present.

Fortinet’s FortiGate delivers a common, flexible, and hyper-scale SecGW platform that provides security visibility and control for versatile RAN architectures and requirements.

This truly secure hybrid infrastructure provides advanced SecGW and L4-L7 security capabilities including:

• Security hyper-scalability to meet 5G’s RAN scalability requirements
• Common security infrastructure for 4G LTE and 5G NR architectures
• Native multi-tenancy for RAN slicing security
• Protection of the RAN’s user plane traffic for industry use cases
• Value add, revenue-generating security via NGFW services
• Complete range of physical and virtual appliances for multi-access edge computing (MEC), regional and central data center or cloud environments