SPIFFE as a Glue for Large Scale Telco Deployments：A Nephio Perspective

Emerging Telco trends such as ORAN, advanced 5G core demands a disaggregated arch for scaling. Kubernetes based deployments are becoming a norm and much of the open CNCF/LF tooling are playing a major role. The aim of this submission is to talk about the challenges that Nephio (www.nephio.org) SIG-Security team faced about streamlining security operations across multi-cluster multi-region, multi-vendor based deployments. The aim is to talk about specific instances/use-cases where the Nephio management cluster needs to securely interact with regional/edge clusters for the control plane needs. Also why/how the Nephio security team envisaged SPIFFE as a foundational layer to bind multi region together. A particular problem statement in the context of ORAN deployments where SMO (Service Mgmt Orchestration) has to securely interact with IMS (Infra Mgmt Service) for secure creation of infrastructure and the role SPIFFE played in the context would be highlighted.